Dikhyaa Mohanty 
Chief Scientist of the World Health Organisation Dr Soumya Swaminathan stated that COVID-19 in India may be entering some kind of stage of endemicity where there is low or moderate level of transmission going on.
According to the reports, the endemic stage is when a population learns to live with a virus and it’s very different from the epidemic stage when the virus overwhelms a population. Dr Soumya stated that on clearance of Covaxin, she is confident that the WHO’s technical group will be satisfied to give Covaxin clearance to be one of its authorised vaccines and that could happen by mid-September.
She further said – “We may be entering some kind of stage of endemicity where there is low-level transmission or moderate level transmission going on but we are not seeing the kinds of exponential growth and peaks that we saw a few months ago. As far as India is concerned that seems to be what is happening and because of the size of India and heterogeneity of population and immunity status in different parts of the country in different pockets, it is very very feasible that the situation may continue like this with ups and downs in different parts of the country, particularly where there are more susceptible population, so those groups who were perhaps less affected by first and second waves or those areas with low levels of vaccine coverage we could see peaks and troughs for the next several months.”
She further added – “We can take from the serosurvey and what we learnt from other countries also that while it is possible that children could get infected and transmit, children luckily have very mild illness most of the time and there is a small percentage that gets sick and get inflammatory complications and few will die but much much less than the adult population…But it is good to prepare… preparing hospitals for paediatric admissions, paediatric intensive care is going to serve our health system in many ways for other illnesses children have but we should not panic about thousands of children crowding into ICUs. Solidarity trial showed Remdesivir does not reduce mortality, it may have a marginal benefit in the subgroup of patients who are ill enough to need oxygen but not ill enough to be on ventilation so there may be a marginal benefit but certainly, Remdesivir does not do much in stage of moderately or severely ill patients. It is also very expensive. Drugs like Dexamethasone and Oxygen are the two essential ones that save lives.”
