Excelsior Correspondent
Srinagar, July 17: The Doctors Association Kashmir (DAK) today said that unvaccinated people offer ways for the COVID-19 virus to mutate and that the newly emerging variants could prolong the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a statement issued here, DAK President Dr Nisar-ul- Hassan said that the new versions of the virus threaten to postpone an end to the ongoing public health crisis.
“Ever since the pandemic began, the new variants continue to pop up which makes it harder for us to exit from the pandemic,” he said.
Dr Nisar said Covid-19 was supposed to be slow to change shape and it was expected that it would not change significantly for years.
“But the virus defied these predictions. It changed quickly and some of the changes were significant enough to designate them as variants of concern,” he said.
DAK President said that a variant is of concern only if it is more contagious, causes more severe disease or evades the immune response.
He said just a couple of months after Covid-19 was discovered in China, a mutation called D614G emerged that made it more likely to spread and it soon became the dominant virus in the world.
The DAK President said another easier-to-spread Delta variant wreaked havoc in Indian states and was responsible for the devastating second wave in the country.
Dr Nisar said at the moment most vaccines appear to be effective against the existing variants, but any further mutations could evade our current vaccines and require booster shots of a tweaked vaccine to deal with them.
“Covid-19 is becoming more genetically diverse because many people are unvaccinated; the greater the unvaccinated pool, the greater the playing field for the virus to replicate and mutate,” he said.
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