Living in the Covid shadow

Hindustan Times

27-05-2025

India now has 1,010 active Covid-19 cases nationwide, with Delhi reporting 104 cases as new variants circulate across the country. Similar upticks are emerging across Asia. Yet health authorities, both in India and elsewhere, are responding with routine preparedness rather than emergency mobilisation — an approach that signals how far we've come from pandemic-era thinking.
The current wave represents exactly what endemic respiratory viruses do — circulate, evolve, and surge periodically without triggering a health-system collapse. These variants show no evidence of increased severity, with symptoms resembling common viral illnesses. The upticks stem from waning immunity and normal viral evolution, not fundamentally dangerous new properties. Encouragingly, the evolution has involved only offshoots of the Omicron variant that first emerged in late 2021 and brought on the pandemic's end. Omicron proved fittest to spread, edging out deadlier variants like Delta and Alpha, but crucially lacked their severe lung-damaging properties.
Respiratory illnesses claim thousands of lives every year through their natural seasonal patterns. Influenza viruses — including H1N1 and H3N2 — regularly surge in deadly waves, like the severe H1N1 season that struck in 2017, nearly a decade after the strain first emerged in 2009. Sars-CoV-2 could theoretically follow this same cyclical path of periodic severe seasons. But it has not yet. India's proportionate response offers the clearest evidence of this epidemiological shift. Despite facing devastating Covid waves during the pandemic, authorities now treat variant detection with vigilance while emphasising standard hospital preparedness and reassuring the public that current symptoms mirror routine respiratory infections. The key metric isn't case numbers but health system impact — and current data shows mild illness without significant hospitalisation spikes.
These periodic surges will become routine, much like accepting that some flu seasons hit harder than others without declaring emergencies. Yet vigilance remains essential. The spring 2021 Delta surge, which Indian surveillance initially missed, led to tens of thousands of fatalities. The balance India now strikes —maintaining robust surveillance while avoiding overreaction — is sensible and must trickle down in how we react to the disease. Treating every variant that emerges as a potential catastrophe will exhaust public health resources and credibility. Covid has joined the roster of manageable endemic respiratory viruses. Our responses must reflect that reality, learning from past failures without surrendering to pandemic-era alarm.