New Delhi: As fear over the ‘Delta Plus’ variant of Covid-19 grips India, AIIMS Director Dr. Randeep Guleria today said there is not much data to conclude that the new strain is more infectious than the other strains or is causing more deaths. He, however, emphasised that Covid-19 appropriate protocol needs to be followed to stay safe from the emerging variants of Coronavirus.
“There isn’t much data on Delta plus variant to suggest it’s more infectious, causing more deaths, or has developed significant immune escape mechanism. But if we follow COVID appropriate behaviour, we’ll be safe against any of emerging variants,” Dr Guleria said.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) today warned that the highly transmissible Delta strain will become the dominant variant of the coronavirus globally in the coming months. Given the increase in transmissibility, the WHO warned that the Delta variant is “expected to rapidly outcompete other variants and become the dominant variant over the coming months.”
In its COVID-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update, the WHO said as of June 29, 2021, “96 countries have reported cases of the Delta variant, though this is likely an underestimate as sequencing capacities needed to identify variants are limited. A number of these countries are attributing surges in infections and hospitalisations to this variant.”
Meanwhile, the AIIMS director also cleared the air on whether India is considering mixing vaccine doses. He said, “More data is needed on mixing of doses, studies show that it may be effective and a little more side effects may be there. But we need more data before we can say that this is a policy that should be tried.”