No need to panic; necessary to closely monitor severity of virus: Experts amid spike in daily COVID infections

New Delhi: Amid a spike in daily coronavirus infections in the country, experts on Friday said that there was no need to panic as the surge in cases isn't a concern but it is necessary to closely monitor the severity of the virus.

"In the current scenario, what matters is hospitalization or severity, the number of cases should not be of any concern," ANI quoted Dr Sanjay Rai, senior epidemiologist at AIIMS as saying.

The senior epidemiologist further stated that the spike in cases is due to the virus mutations, however, it's not happening only in India but across the world.

"SARS CoV2 is RNA virus and in RNA virus mutations are happening not only in India throughout the world, but more than thousands of mutations have also already occurred. Although the variant of concerns is only five. We must monitor if the virus is increasing deaths and if the hospitalization is increasing, then definitely it's a matter of concern," he said.

Dr Rai stressed that it's unlikely that the new mutations will lead to a surge in hospitalisation or the virus-related deaths.

"We have generated a lot of pieces of evidence in the last two years. It's not a new virus. In the last two years, whatever evidence we have, we can say that it's very unlikely that the increase of cases will increase the number of hospitalizations and a high number of severity or deaths," he said.

According to him, there is the chances of severity are low.

"This type of pandemic like COVID-19 disease that the future course will be gone by the level of protection. We know that there we have two types of protection. One is from the natural immunity and another one is from your vaccine-acquired immunity. The limitation of vaccine acquired immunity is certainly six to nine months and that's why we require a booster dose for natural infection," the senior epidemiologist said.

India reported 17,336 new cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours as compared to the 13,313 total cases recorded on Thursday, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW).