Not over yet

New variants of the deadly Covid-19 virus have kept the entire world on tenterhooks. Yet in Kashmir, it seems people have, yet again, put the threat associated with the variants and the ultimate scare of an even deadlier third wave behind them. One can notice that in markets, health resorts, and other places how people are barely sticking to the already explained and established Covid-19 protocol. Majority seems to ignore them now as if the threat is over. While one understands that a fairly large section of the population has received at least one dose of the vaccination, no expert has claimed that being partly, or even fully, inoculated makes a person 100% safe from the virus. People, however, seem to be adamantly ignoring the Covid SOPs. Majority are seen not wearing masks and social distance has gone for a toss. This is happening when several countries across the world are seeing fresh surges in Covid-19 cases as Delta plus, Lambda, and Kappa variants of the virus keep on challenging the existing healthcare and vaccination mechanism that the world has developed since the pandemic first began. Health experts in Kashmir have sounded the alarm bells. They say the third wave of Covid will be highly dangerous and can take a heavy toll on lives while suggesting that people should follow the guidelines fixed previously in order to minimise the impact of the new wave. On Thursday, the World Health Organization announced that the COVID19 situation globally is very dangerous with high levels of transmission driven by four factors including virus variants, increased social mixing and mobility of people , inappropriate use of public health and social measures, and last but not the least vaccine inequity. According to WHO’s Weekly epidemiological update on COVID-19 the cumulative number of cases reported globally now exceeds 183 million and the number of deaths is almost 4 million. Last week, all regions reported an increase in new cases and death toll except for the Americas. The WHO called for implementing healthcare measures in a tailored and agile way, particularly considering uncertainty in vaccine performance against known and potentially emerging variants of concern and limited sequencing capacity to detect variants worldwide. Moreover, significant inequities in global vaccine access mean that, globally, control of disease will continue to rely on the public health and social measures for the foreseeable future, modulated by different levels of vaccination. Implementation of stricter public health and social measures, however, needs to be balanced against their socioeconomic impacts, especially in settings with high dependence on daily wages and informal economy. Decisions to tighten, loosen, or introduce curbs to control COVID-19 must be weighed against the positive and negative impacts these measures have on societies and individuals. At the same time, people too need to reiterate themselves that the pandemic is not over yet and the fight against it needs to be fought on all levels. We all need to realise our role in dealing with this global health crisis and adopt the tried and tested measures to win over it.