India’s health ministry on Thursday confirmed 41,383 new cases and 507 fatalities, taking the total to 31,257,720 cases (409,394 active cases) and 418,987 fatalities.
Worldwide: Over 192.84 million cases and 4,142,679 fatalities.
Vaccination in India: 417,851,151 doses. Worldwide: Over 3.71 billion doses
Governments across the world are moving away from a cautious approach and instead encouraging people to transition to the new normal, and return en masse to offices and restaurants.
Increasingly, the message is the same: We have to learn to live with the virus.
This week, England removed nearly all virus restrictions. Germany is allowing vaccinated people to travel without quarantine. Outdoor mask mandates are mostly gone in Italy. Shopping malls are open in Singapore. And countries with zero-Covid policies — like Australia — are rethinking them.
In Asia, Europe and the Americas, officials are coming to terms with the idea that lockdowns and restrictions will need to be reimposed and lifted as needed. They are now encouraging people to focus on avoiding severe illness and death, instead of infections, which are harder to avoid.
Singapore is planning a shift to monitoring severe illness instead of infections, citing Israel as a model, which has pivoted to “soft suppression.” Both have recently seen a sharp rise in cases.
Some scientists are warning that it may be too soon. Read countries taking shortcuts on their way to reopening were putting unvaccinated people at risk and gambling with lives.
Scientists say that Covid-19 should not be treated like the flu, because it is far more dangerous, and we still don’t fully understand the long-term symptoms of the disease. They are also uncertain how long vaccine immunity will last, and how well doses protect against the variants.
The virus is also raging in the developing world; only 1% of people in low-income countries have received a vaccine dose, according to the Our World in Data. That gives the virus a greater opportunity to rapidly replicate, which increases the risks of more mutations and spread — and as more transmissible variants, like Delta, emerge, it’s putting even wealthy nations with lots of vaccines at risk.
A little over half of 60 serious post-vaccination adverse events were triggered by anxiety, a causality assessment study by a government panel found.
According to the report by the National Adverse Events Following Immunization (AEFI) Committee, of the 60 adverse events it studied, 36 were related to anxiety, 18 were vaccine-related and one was classified as both vaccine-related and anxiety-related. Five cases, including a death, had an inconsistent causal association to vaccines.
Women showed more anxiety post-vaccination, the study said. “The fear of needles is resulting in anxiety and hesitancy as well. We have to see how to overcome needle phobia,” a senior official told the Economic Times.
The committee included medical specialists, cardiologists, neurologists, pulmonary medicine specialists, and obstetrician-gynaecologists.
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