At HTLS 2020, experts say we will have to learn to live with Covid-19

The coronavirus pandemic is going to be around for some time and people will have to learn to live with the viral disease, two medical experts cautioned on Thursday as they said they were hopeful about the development of the vaccines against Covid-19. Randeep Guleria, the director of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), and Ashish K Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, also talked about what the way forward against the coronavirus pandemic could be.

“I think the virus is going to be there for a very long time and I would say we are learning to live with it. And with the vaccine, we will learn to live in a way that doesn’t cause us the level of disruption that it did this year,” Jha said at the inaugural session of the 18th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit. Guleria, along with Jha, was speaking to Hindustan Times’ editor-in-chief R Sukumar during the session Covid-19; Where Do We Stand.

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“This is a very smart virus. The more you learn about it, the more you admire it... It bypasses your defence mechanism,” Guleria pointed out. “We will have to learn to live with and learn to control it,” he also cautioned.

The two experts also spoke about the progress on the development of the vaccines against the coronavirus disease. “No one considered such a high vaccine efficacy, especially in the older population,” Guleria said.

Guleria, among the first speakers at HTLS 2020, also cautioned that the challenge would be to reach out to the frontline population for getting them vaccinated. “The Indian government is in talks with Pfizer but not so much with Moderna. We have two challenges in front of us now. One, to break the transmission chain and the second is to make the vaccine available to all,” Guleria, who is also a key member of the government’s task force against the fight against the coronavirus disease, said.

Jha said the evidence so far about the Covid-19 vaccines has been largely reassuring. “There is still a lot more that remains unknown... Some people have no symptoms at all. In the early phase, it works like a normal virus. In the second phase, it aggravates,” Jha said.

Speaking on whether India is ready to fight another pandemic in the future, Dr Guleria said the country’s response has been “pretty good.” “We have done pretty well in terms of being innovative and have had a very interesting journey... What this has shown us is that we are a very resilient nation. When we started off there was a lot panic that we would not have enough PPE and ventilators. We were able to manage all of that and we have the capacity to export PPEs,” he said.

India recorded 45,576 new cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), taking total infections to 8.96 million, data from the health ministry showed on Thursday. Before this, India had been reporting less than 39,000 daily infections for the past three days. India has the world’s second-highest number of Covid-19 infections after the United States, but cases have been falling since hitting a peak in September. Fatalities in the country rose by 585, with the death toll now at 131,578, the ministry said.

Guleria and Jha were the first speakers at the 18th edition of the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit. The theme of this year’s HTLS, which will be held virtually, is ‘Defining a New Era’ as the world grapples with the coronavirus pandemic. The live discussions with leaders across sectors will be spread over four weeks and will be held every Thursday and Friday.