Rising Delta variant cases make Covid-19 third wave real risk for India

A foreign brokerage firm has cautioned that rising cases of the Delta variant and the subsequent mutations of the virus have now made the probability look a real risk for India.

News agency PTI quoted Tanvee Gupta-Jain who is the chief economist of UBS Securities India, said the third wave risks are real even more now as economic activity has improved sequentially for the seventh successive week to July 12, with several states gradually easing curbs on movement.  The UBS report further suggests that the pace of vaccination has also slowed down to under 3.4 million doses per day as against four million jabs earlier along with 45 per cent of the daily Covid-19 case count being reported from the rural regions of India.

On Wednesday, Tanvee Gupta Jain said “Although the number of daily Covid-19 cases seems to have plateaued, the same still remains much above the 2021 trough and the drop in active caseload has also started to narrow down.” She further added, “In more than 20 per cent of the top districts accounting for most of the daily cases and where the second wave of Covid-19 has not yet dialled down, the third wave has already set firmly in. The figure was only 5 per cent even a month before.”

“While economic pointers are coming back to normalcy, they are still mixed. They stated that railway and domestic airline passenger traffic has improved further in the country, but toll collections have plateaued for the latest reporting week, as per the UBS-India activity indicator. Additionally, while power demand rose by 11 per cent partly due to summer, railway freight has dropped by 1.9 per cent week-on-week.” she added.

in more than 20 per cent of the top districts accounting for most of the daily cases and where the second wave of Covid-19 has not yet dialled down, the third wave has already set firmly in. The figure was only 5 per cent even a month before, it said.

The Union ministry of health and family welfare (MoHFW) data showed that India has registered 41,806 new infections in the last 24 hours. However, 39,13,40,491 doses against Covid-19 have so far been administered in the country.  World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the pandemic is now in the “early stages” of the third wave.  He further said, “The Delta variant is now in more than 111 countries and we expect it to soon be the dominant Covid-19 strain circulating worldwide, if it isn’t already,”