新型コロナウイルス感染症（COVID-19）の感染者増加：どうすれば安全を保てるか？ | Firstpost PoV

新型コロナウイルス感染症（COVID-19）の感染者増加：どうすれば安全を保てるか？ | Firstpost PoV | N18G

hello and welcome to a first post POV today we are talking about something that we thought we had left behind in 2022 and 2023 that’s COVID 19 cases are once again rising across the world including here in India hundreds of cases are being reported every day the question is what is leading this resurgence and how should you and how should the government respond to it to answer these questions let me introduce my guest Dr aish Dalja who’s a senior scholar and infectious disease expert at John Hopkins thank you so much doctor for speaking to us let’s answer thanks for having me yeah let’s answer the why first why are we seeing a resurgence of this virus because um until the last couple of months this wasn’t the case and suddenly every country across the world is reporting a surge in COVID 19 cases what is driving this surge so so first of all it’s not that every country around the world is reporting a surge it’s very geographically restricted if you look at the WHO report so Southeast Asia Western Pacific Eastern Mediterranean those areas of the world are where you’re seeing an increase i’m here in the United States and we are not seeing an increase and I worked yesterday at the hospital so it’s not uniform but what you have to recall about CO 19 is that this is an endemic infectious disease meaning that it’s going to occur year in and year out like many other respiratory illnesses and the virus is going to continue to mutate in order to be able to infect a population that has immunity from prior infections from vaccinations a and that’s going to be the case going forward that we will see ups and downs of this virus as new variants appear and it’s not going to be uniform and it’s not going to be like it was in the early days where you saw hospitals overrun and deaths at very astronomical numbers this has become much more manageable but we will always have these ups and downs with this virus so if I’m hearing you right maybe like five or six years down the line we could still have these sort of minor upticks in cases and then the numbers come down again are you saying that COVID 19 or the virus is probably here to stay for some time something like the flu that we have every season exactly co 19 is an endemic illness meaning it’s going to occur year in and year out it is established itself in the human population so it will be with us in perpetuity just like influenza and remember with influenza when it gets cold in the winter months and you you see an increase in cases very similarly with COVID you see an increase in cases in the winter months and also sometimes in the summer months based on the variance but that’s what we’re looking at that CO is going to join the other respiratory viruses that plague us year in and year out but will never be able to do the damage that it once could because of the tools that science and medicine have developed right now you said that cases are rising in Southeast Asia and in India but not necessarily in places like the United States is there any reason why there is a geographical limitation to the surges right now is it because of vaccination rates or something else it may have to do with just where new variants are arising and certain uniqueness about the population how the population is interacting it’s not always going to be uniform we do expect though in the United States that we will see an increase as we get into summer um we are our our summer month summer starts in about two weeks or so and we’ve always seen an increase in CO activity at the beginning of summer so we’re anticipating seeing that happen again but CO is not synchronized across the globe so you can have ups and downs in different parts of the world because people interact differently with each other in different parts of the world certain events occur certain variants arise in certain areas so it’s not always going to be just one uniform level of COVID uh moving forward we got we’re going to have different seasonality different spikes occurring in different parts of the world so then how do we live with this particular infection do we do we modify our vaccines every season and take them again do we go back to wearing masks perhaps if you have some sort of underlying condition already how do we learn to live with this particular disease well thankfully for CO 19 we have more tools than for any other respiratory virus we have home tests we have masks we have vaccines we have antivirals we have monoconal antibodies we have a whole we have wastewater surveillance we have a whole host of tools that we use for CO 19 that I wish we had for influenza so those tools allow us to live with this virus and how people use those tools are going to be different based on their risk factors for severe disease so if you are somebody that has a risk factor for severe disease you should think during COVID increases about wearing a mask when you’re in crowded indoor places you should also stay up to date with the vaccines and we have vaccine developers that are updating the vaccines to more closely match what circulates uh and the other thing is that we also need to get better vaccines madna in the United States just had a next generation vaccine approved that is supposedly more immunogenic giving you more protection so we need to keep developing better co vaccines and eventually hopefully we get what we will call a universal co vaccine one that works against all strains or or maybe nasal vaccines that are more protective against infection so we will continue to see innovation to make co easier and easier to to live with but right now in 2025 it is much easier to live with co 19 than it was in 2020 so what about the government response is this a situation where the government has to release new set of advisories to at least contain the panic that’s been created because as we know covid-19 because of the recency value a lot of people are panicking when they hear that cases are increasing though like you mentioned it is something that we are going to have to learn to live with so what role do you see the government playing do they need to come out with fresh advisories is it about panic containment at the moment what’s the strategy for them government public health agencies should put out guidance about what vaccines to use which groups are it’s important to use vaccines in how to use antivirals how to use home tests strategically when masking might be prudent when it’s when it might be unnecessary updating the general public about what’s going on the hospital capacity in a given area all of those are going to be roles for public health agencies and government to keep people apprised of what’s going on and also to really re-emphasize the message that 2025 is not 2020 that this virus is always going to do this and people have to acclimatize to it they have to learn to live in a world where CO 19 is always going to be present just like they live in a world in which influenza is always present so if I’m hearing you right this is something yes like you mentioned that we have to live with which also brings me to the question about the vaccines and how they have to be modified as the vaccines that we have at the moment considering those vaccines which are present and available to the public who would you say should be considering getting those booster shots of the existing vaccines are these people with underlying diseases are these young kids senior citizens or is it not necessary at the moment it is the high-risisk group and that high-risisk group is a lot of people so that will include people above the age of 65 people who are obese people who are overweight people with any heart or lung disease people who are imunompromised people who have are pregnant that that’s a large swath of the population and I would also say children need to get the doses of the vaccine as part of their routine childhood immunization at least the initial series uh for children when they’re 6 months of age so that’s a large group of people that I think need to be continuing to get the vaccine and I think if we do that we will continue to have CO be manageable when you’re seeing CO 19 hospitalizations and deaths occurring now in 2025 they’re largely preventable and they largely are due to the fact that people aren’t using the tools optimally now one thing that everybody’s talking about are the mutations because this is a virus that appears to keep mutating like a lot of infectious diseases and the viruses some researchers have said that this particular strain that is in circulation right now could be one or one or a couple of mutations away from triggering yet another outbreak do you agree with that assessment or do you think this is just unnecessary fear-mongering at the moment well every time the virus mutates there are Darwinian forces on it trying to make it able to infect a population that has a lot of immunity so every time it mutates and it starts to spread that that’s going to be a more fit a more evolved virus one that’s better able to infect us and yes that can increase the number of cases but you have to remember that cases are always going to go up and down and they’re largely going to be decoupled or separated from major rises in hospitalizations major rises in deaths yes hospitalizations and deaths may go up but that relationship is really severed because of the immunity the rates of severe disease will not go up and I think when you’re talking about an endemic respiratory virus you really have to focus on severe disease you can’t at this point keep counting the mild cases those mild cases are always going to occur just like they do with other respiratory virus the key key thing is trying to keep people out of the hospital by using the tool so we’re always going to see this and after this variant comes another one will replace it and I’ll be asked the exact same questions again this is going to go on in perpetuity this is what an endemic respiratory virus does right and finally let’s just pull back from the outbreak that we’re seeing and just talk about CO in general now one thing that a lot of people asked in 2022 and 2023 once those cases subsided was about long CO and the sort of impact that this infection would have on people’s health in the long term back then a lot of researchers said it’s perhaps a bit too early we should do some more research before finding the answer i’m wondering if in this time we have done more research to find out what sort of impact CO could have on people in the long term so we do have more information about long CO we know that it occurs in a minority of patients after they’re infected a lot of those people got infected during the first waves of this virus before there was any immunity in the population long before there were vaccines and we’ve still seen longco occur but it’s less frequent now in the omccron era but yes it still occurs and we’re starting to learn a little bit about the changes in the immune system that might allow long CO to occur how long it lasts what symptoms are more common and and that’s basically about it we’re still scratching the surface of learning how to treat it we’re still not really good at diagnosing it exactly we kind of have a general idea so there’s a lot more work that needs to be done about long COVID but thankfully it’s becoming less common now and we know that people who were vaccinated are less likely to develop long co but this is something that’s going to be studied for years and years and maybe decades to really unravel the mysteries of long co and why it occurs how it occurs and how long it lasts in some people right i think the big takeaways from this chat are that this is now an endemic we go we have to learn to live with this particular infection and to the government the message is clearly do not spread panic contain the situation vaccinate the people who have under underlying diseases or conditions and like I said before don’t panic thank you so much Dr delja for speaking to us thanks for having me

Covid-19 Cases Rise: How Can You Stay Safe? | Firstpost PoV | N18G

Covid-19 cases are rising in India and parts of Southeast Asia. What is driving this latest surge? Should we start learning to live with this infection? What precautions can you take to stay safe? John Hopkins doctor Amesh Adalja explains in conversation with Firstpost’s Prathik S Vinod.

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