Here's What We Know So Far About The Third Wave Of COVID-19

Third Wave COVID-19: The Union Health Ministry of India informed on Wednesday that the spread of COVID-19 infection in the country makes it clear that the third wave of the virus is inevitable. However, when the wave will come and for how long, cannot be predicted yet, but the country needs to prepare in advance.

K Vijay Raghavan, who is the Principal Scientific Adviser to Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the main challenge in the third wave will be to detect the variants with the capacity to escape vaccines and alter the inoculation strategies.

Here's what we know about the third wave of COVID-19 so far.

- Among many variants of the virus active in India, the most dangerous is the Double Mutant virus named B.1.617 by scientists.
Many other variants have been identified in different states of India in which, the Andhra Pradesh variant is the most discussed. It is, however, limited in very few areas.

- According to scientists and researchers, these variants are currently creating new strains of the virus, which will lead to the virus attacking people by taking many forms. Due to these variants, which are increasing in number, the third wave of COVID can come into the country.

- The time that the virus takes to kill the lungs has been decreasing with consecutive waves. In the first wave, it killed the lungs in 10 days, which reduced to 5-7 days in the second wave. This time could even decrease to 2-3 days in the third wave of the pandemic.

- The Andhra Pradesh variant is working similarly. This COVID-19 variant kills a person's lungs within 2-3 days and is also 15 times more contagious than any other variant of the virus.

- In the first and second wave, the virus attacked the elderly and the youth. However, it is being said that the third wave can be most dangerous for children.

- Children under the age of 18 accounts for 30 per cent of the total population of India and no vaccine has been introduced for those under 18 so far.

- It has been estimated that if people above 18 years of age get fully vaccinated, then the virus would most likely attack the kids under 18 causing serious harm to the children between the age 6 to 12 years.

- To counter the adaptive variants that could escape available vaccines, active surveillance would be needed along with vaccine updates.