As the new Covid-19 sub-variant, JN.1, rapidly spreads across India, former WHO chief scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan speaks to Anuradha Mascarenhas on how the mutating virus would continue to be a global public health threat. Dr Swaminathan, who attended the high-level review meeting chaired by Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya about the upsurge in Covid-19 cases, said that that the WHO had just declared the end of a public health emergency but never said it was the end of the pandemic or that we should lower the guard rails. Is this variant more severe? We need more data to answer that question. As of now, we do not have enough data. However, other countries do and based on that, JN.1 does not seem to be behaving differently. Yes, it is more transmissible, any virus has to be more transmissible to become the dominant variant. So far it seems to be the same as Omicron. If it spreads a lot, then there will be a certain number of people who will get sick and end up in hospitals. But that is true of any emerging variant. Right now we have data from a few states which are doing the testing and sequencing. We will need more data on hospitalisation and severity to correlate that with the variant. What precautions should we take for the holiday season? Do we need travel restrictions? We have come a long way since the early days of the lockdown. People have been vaccinated, have infection-acquired immunity too. We know what to do and what precautions to take. There is no need for travel mandates. And take precautions at the individual level. Wear a mask if you are in a crowded place, don’t go to work if you have flu-like symptoms, stay at home for a day or two for them to subside. The thing is by the time a variant gets picked up in one country or place, it has already spread all over. We have seen that before too. Hence it does not make sense to impose travel restrictions. Of course the caseload may vary in different states of the country. What about waning immunity and the future trajectory of the virus? The virus is going exactly the way it was predicted. WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus kept saying that COVID-19 was not over and that it would continue to be a global health threat. This means that every time it changes, there will be an upsurge in cases. Over time, a virus mutates and evolves till there comes a variant that may be more severe. After the Delta wave though, all variants have been less severe so far. People also have more immunity now and that helps. That is why one is not seeing as severe an illness as one did in the first few years of the pandemic when people were not protected. Yes, we are seeing more infections, but not many allied complications. Over time that could change too. The immunity may wane in certain age groups, which is why we need to keep collecting data so that decisions can be made on booster doses for vulnerable groups. For now, the vaccines are effective.
