ABSTRACT
With the roll-out of worlds largest vaccine drive for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by Government of India on January 16 2021, India has targeted to vaccinate its entire population by the end of year 2021. Struggling with vaccine procurement and production earlier, India came up with these hurdles but the Indian population still did not seem to be mobilizing swiftly towards vaccination centers. With the initial hesitancy, as soon as the vaccination started to speedup, India was hit severely by the second wave. The severe second wave has slowed down the vaccination pace and also it was one of the major contributing factor of vaccine hesitancy. To understand the nature of vaccine hesitancy and factors underlying it, we conducted an extensive online and offline surveys in Varanasi and adjoining regions using structured questions. Majority of respondents though were students (0.633), respondents from other occupations such as government officials (0.10) were also included in the study. We observed several intriguing opinions on our eleven questions. It is interesting to note that the majority of the people (0.75) relied on fake news and did not take COVID-19 seriously. Most importantly, we noticed that a substantial proportion of respondents (relative frequency 0.151; mean age 24.8 years) reported that they are still not interested in vaccination. People who have neither been vaccinated nor have ever been infected may become the medium for spreading the virus and creating new variants. This could also lead to a resistant variant of the vaccine in the future. We expect that this extensive survey may help the government to upgrade their vaccination policies for COVID-19 in North India.
Subject(s)
Coronavirus Infections , Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome , COVID-19ABSTRACT
Studies worldwide have shown that the available vaccines are highly effective against SARS-CoV-2. However, there are growing laboratory reports that the newer variants of concerns (VOCs e.g. Alpha, Beta, Delta etc) may evade vaccine induced defense. In addition to that, there are few ground reports on health workers having breakthrough infections. In order to understand VOC driven breakthrough infection we investigated 14 individuals who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 after being administered a single or double dose of Covishield (ChAdOx1, Serum Institute of India) from the city of Varanasi, which is located in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Genomic analysis revealed that 78.6% (11/14) of the patients were infected with the B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant. Notably, the frequency (37%) of this variant in the region was significantly lower (p<0.01), suggesting that the vaccinated people were asymmetrically infected with the Delta variant. Most of the patients tested displayed mild symptoms, indicating that even a single dose of the vaccine can help in reducing the severity of the disease. However, more comprehensive epidemiological studies are required to understand the effectiveness of vaccines against the newer VOCs.
Subject(s)
Breakthrough PainABSTRACT
Infection born by Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has swept the world within a time of a few months. It has created a devastating effect on humanity with social and economic depressions. Europe and America were the hardest hit continents. India has also lost several lives, making the country fourth most deadly worldwide. However, the infection and death rate per million and the case fatality ratio in India were substantially lower than many of the developed nations. Several factors have been proposed including the genetics. One of the important facts is that a large chunk of Indian population is asymptomatic to the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Thus, the real infection in India is much higher than the reported number of cases. Therefore, the majority of people are already immune in the country. To understand the dynamics of real infection as well as level of immunity against SARS-CoV-2, we have performed antibody testing (serosurveillance) in the urban region of fourteen Indian districts encompassing six states. In our survey, the seroprevalence frequency varied between 0.01-0.48, suggesting high variability of viral transmission among states. We also found out that the cases reported by the Government were several fold lower than the real infection. This discrepancy is majorly driven by a higher number of asymptomatic cases. Overall, we suggest that with the high level of immunity developed against SARS-CoV-2 in the majority of the districts, it is less likely to have a second wave in India.