“The surge is going to be very fast and many people are going to be sick,” WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan has warned as COVID-19 cases continue to explode in India. 

Speaking to NDTV, she alerted that the biggest challenge the country will face with the increasing threat of Omicron will be the sudden need for medical care. “People are worried. You may not have symptoms but you would want to talk to a doctor, you’d want to see a healthcare worker, and you’d want advice. That’s what we will have to prepare for,” she said.

This will see the burden shift from hospitals to the out-patients department and from ICUs to home-based care. 

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“The whole burden of this outbreak will be more on out-patients and home-based services rather than ICU and hospital beds for severely ill.”

One way to address this demand could be upgrading and ramping up teleconsultation services. In the words of Swaminathan, “Maybe, this is the time to really scale up the telehealth and telemedicine services to make sure we have enough doctors and nurses in out-patients’ clinics; make sure we can treat people at home as much as possible or at primary care isolation centres where they get basic care if they don’t need advance care.”

People must not take the new variant lightly and assume it will not pose a serious health threat. While early studies have pointed towards it leading to milder illnesses, no conclusion can be reached yet. 

“We have seen a lot of data coming in; mainly from South Africa and the UK. What South Africans have shown is that the surge, the number of cases they experienced with the Omicron compared to Delta and other surges was four times more. It is that much more transmissible.”

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“The actual number was 40,000 in the previous outbreaks during the peak and it was around 1,40,000 during Omicron. But at the same time, the risk of hospitalisation was one-fourth. So, it evens out – four times more transmissible, one-fourth the risk of hospitalisation. You end up with the same number of people in the hospitals,” she added.

While Omicron has been found to be highly transmissible, evidence has so far shown it may not lead to serious illnesses in most cases. 

“Once somebody is in the hospital for whatever reasons – because of comorbidity or they have to observed – it has been found that the risk of becoming very severely ill, needing critical care and ventilation or in fact dying, was much less with Omicron compared to the other variants,” she told NDTV.

Nevertheless, the high transmissibility can shake up health systems and overwhelm the country’s hospitals, even if the overall outcomes tend to be better with this variant.

The country witnessed the highest number of recorded omicron cases today, with a single-day tally of 309 cases. Currently, the total number of omicron detections in the country is 1,270 as per the Union Health ministry.