Sources say that foreign visitors who arrived in India between December 24, 2022 and January 3, 2023 came across eleven new COVID-19 variants. 124 of the 19,227 passengers tested for COVID-19 at that time came back positive.
According to Dr. M Wali, a physician at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi, the new COVID-19 XBB 1.5 variant is not a concern for India because booster doses have been administered to 30 percent to 40 percent of the eligible population, with 90 percent of those individuals having received vaccinations.
Dr. M Wali, has also cautioned against going outside without a reason and urged people to exercise caution, keeping their elderly loved ones and young children to themselves. He advised people to act appropriately for COVID-19 and, most importantly, to mask.
Dr. M. Wali emphasized the importance of immunity in the fight against the virus, stating that vaccination, the initial infection, a booster dose, and strong immunity all work together to reduce the virus’s aggressiveness. Instead of requiring hospital admission, it is sufficient to isolate infected individuals and send their samples for genome sequencing.
In the meantime, Eric Feigl-Ding, a renowned epidemiologist, health economist, and scientist from the United States, asserted that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had ignored the risks posed by the new variant, which was the reason for the high rate of hospitalizations. The fact that the XBB.1.5 COVID-19 strain originated in the northeastern United States was not acknowledged by the CDC.
