Despite vaccination, masks to remain with us for a long duration
New Delhi : After a roller coaster ride in 2020 by coronavirus, the good news is that most of the nations have already started vaccination against the virus; talking about India, the government has plans to vaccinate around 300 million health workers in January 2021. But does that mean an end on wearing masks? Well the answer is a big 'NO' and I explain this in this article.
The UK started vaccinating people a few weeks back and then there was news of spotting a new strain of coronavirus that forced authorities to impose a fresh lockdown in the nation. Many countries have stopped their flights to the UK. The incident is more than enough to confirm that despite vaccination available, precautions need to be carried for a longer duration in future.
"There is no need to change the existing treatment protocol in view of mutations emerging in the strain. Further, since Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has always advocated use of two or more gene assays for testing Sars-CoV-2, it is unlikely to miss infected cases using the current testing strategy," concluded experts at the meeting of the National Task Force on Covid-19 on Saturday under co-chairs of Dr Vinod Paul, member Niti Aayog, and Dr Balram Bhargava, director general, ICMR.
Getting infected and taking treatment is not a great way to tackle any disease, the wiser way is to stop transmission and reduce exposure, which can be attained by wearing masks, observing social distancing and frequently washing hands.
Just a reminder before you ditch your mask that 80 million people were infected with coronavirus and more than 1.75 million people lost their lives because of it in a time span of just one year.
Another interesting fact is that the medicines which are going to arrive in India for the treatment of coronavirus take around 4 to 6 weeks to attain the desired immunity against it. So, continuing social behaviour is the only way forward.
Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca-Oxford are the three vaccines which have been approved by the Indian authorities to be used on frontline workers. The effectiveness of vaccine in a long run is yet to be tested; which makes use of masks and hand sanitizers a prime way of protection.
It should also be noted that the vaccines have been designed for the treatment of coronavirus and they have nothing to stop transmission of coronavirus.
Meanwhile, the current coronavirus wave in India is appearing to be weakening with the last seven days average of cases to be around 20,000 from 97,399 cases in its peak day on September 10.
