NEW DELHI : With India’s caseload mostly comprising sub-lineages of Omicron rather than any other variant, the government is of the view that covid-19 is no longer a pandemic but moving towards endemicity, said department of science and technology secretary Rajesh Gokhale.
He added that while previous variants— Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta — were different from each other; the current variants are emerging only from Omicron, indicating endemicity in the country, meaning the disease is set to “stay with us". “In many cases, it is very clearly understood that there will be sporadic events that will occur.
That’s how endemicity occurs actually. So, we will always get some variants. We have to look at the evolution of the virus. The way Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron have come, all of these were different from each other, which indicated that they did not emerge from one or the other. “But now, what we are looking at is that variants are emerging from Omicron only.
So, this is the typical scenario of endemicity occurring," he said in an interview. Omicron remains the dominant variant circulating globally, accounting for 97% of sequences reported.