Covid is back: Cause for concern, but not for panic

livemint.com:

A sub-variant of the all-too-familiar Omicron, dubbed JN.1, is the villain this time around. India has experience combating mass covid infections, unlike when the pandemic hit us in 2020. Hospitals are better equipped with oxygen, ventilators and medical staff who know what to do in the face of a covid surge.

India has the capacity to produce vaccines at scale. The capacity to develop new vaccines is more rudimentary and sporadic, but it exists and needs to be boosted. It is entirely likely that the new variant is immune to vaccines that targeted earlier strains of the fast-mutating corona virus causing covid.

So far with the JN.1 variant, the infections that have manifested have been mild, affecting chiefly the upper respiratory tract without causing the oxygen-rejecting inflammation of lung tissue that virulent forms of covid entailed. Still, just because the overt symptoms are mild and virtually indistinguishable from the infections caused by the influenza virus or the common cold virus, it does not mean that the disease can be ignored. Covid has caused lingering after-effects, some of them nasty for people with comorbidities, unlike the other viruses that produce similar symptoms.

It makes sense to identify the cause of a severe upper respiratory tract infection.   Testing everyone for covid is neither affordable nor necessary. Testing sewage samples from different settlements is a simpler method. Genomic sequencing of the germs collected from such samples would help identify clusters, if any, of covid infections.