Fourth Wave of Corona in India: “It is possible that a later variant may be back to a Delta or Alpha lineage, with sufficient immune evasion to sweep Omicron away”, said an expert.
Fourth Wave of Corona: Next variant of coronavirus can lead to grave infections like the Delta, Alpha, scientists claimed. “It is possible that a later variant may be back to a Delta or Alpha lineage, with sufficient immune evasion to sweep Omicron away,” Andrew Rambaut, who studies viral evolution at the University of Edinburgh, UK, told scientific journal Nature
Researchers in India, on the other hand, believed that there is always a fair chance that a possible new variant of coronavirus may have an intense impact on the whole analysis. The impact will depend on the various factors like the variant’s infectibility, fatality, etc, they said.
Apart from this fact, the effect of vaccinations — first, second or booster dosage may also play a significant role on the possibility of infection, degree of infection and various issues related to the fourth wave,” researchers stated
Earlier this year, officials at the World Health Organization had warned that Omicron may not be the last Covid variant and the next strain could be more contagious. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had cautioned people against any complacency, asserting that it is dangerous to assume that ‘we are in the endgame’.
Maria van Kerkhove, the global health body’s technical lead on Covid-19, also claimed that Omicron will not be the last variant of the coronavirus and there could be more in the days to come
Fourth Wave of COVID in India
The fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India may start around June 22 and peak from mid to late August, a modeling study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur suggests. The same research team had previously predicted that the third wave of the pandemic in India would peak by February 3, 2022.
The yet-to-be peer-reviewed study, recently posted on the preprint repository MedRxiv, used a statistical model to make the prediction, finding that the possible new wave will last for four months.
The study led by Sabara Parshad Rajeshbhai, Subhra Sankar Dhar, and Shalabh of IIT Kanpur’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics shows that the severity of the fourth wave will depend on the emergence of a possible new coronavirus variant, and vaccination status across the country.
“The data indicates that the fourth wave of COVID-19 in India will arrive after 936 days from the initial data availability date, which is January 30, 2020. Therefore, the fourth wave starts from June 22, 2022, reaching its peak on August 23, 2022, and ends on October 24, 2022,” the authors of the study said.
