Should India be alarmed by China’s COVID surge?
The HinduWith the surge in COVID-19 cases in China, after the easing of its stringent zero-COVID policy in December, there is apprehension that the pandemic could be entering a new, uncertain phase. But there’s been a lot of natural infection over the last three years, and therefore people have built up a good level of protective immunity at the population level. Among the three factors, there is an advantage for India and other countries where the host immunity is better, whether because of hybrid immunity or relatively expanded vaccine coverage. From studies done so far, the data point towards an advantage to heterologous boost, which means that if you’ve had the first two shots with an adenoviral-vectored vaccine, and you get a third shot with a protein subunit or an mRNA vaccine, or the other way around, probably what it does is it helps to stimulate different arms of the immune system. I think that’s where probably we can do a little bit better, in terms of how we are quickly able to use the data coming out to take public health action.