Dr Swaminathan also pointed out that India’s health systems have come a long way from how they were during the first wave in 2020 and the deadlier Delta wave in 2021, and the country is well prepared to handle an uptick in cases. Dr Jayadevan said 30% of all patients with influenza-like illnesses who were tested have turned out to be COVID-19 positive in the Kochi region in about 24 hours.

Both experts spoke exclusively to NDTV.

Both experts, however, emphasised that the variant, while more transmissible, may not cause a high number of hospitalisations, partly because of India’s high vaccination rate. Dr Swaminathan also pointed out that India’s health systems have come a long way from how they were during the first wave in 2020 and the deadlier Delta wave in 2021, and the country is well prepared to handle an uptick in cases.

Dr Swaminathan also listed out the precautions that people can take and stressed the need for the elderly and those with poor immunity to start masking up.

According to Dr Jayadevan, while JN.1 is considered the fastest-rising variant, it does not necessarily mean more cases but that it is “dominating the Covid landscape”. He also pointed out that while cases are increasing, people are being able to treat the symptoms at home.

On the JN.1 variant, Dr Swaminathan said it is a sub-variant of Omicron and will hopefully behave like Omicron, which was relatively mild. But every new variant gets some properties of being more transmissible. It is able to evade or avoid the antibody responses that we already have in our system. And therefore it is able to create these waves of infection where it infects people who’ve already been infected before, she added.

Both experts advised people to mask up in closed and crowded places.

On a note of caution, Dr Swaminathan told NDTV said, “It’s very different from the common cold, not just because of people getting severely ill with acute Covid pneumonia, but also because of the long-term effects of Covid. And I think we have enough data now from around the world to know that people who have suffered from Covid and, particularly those who have repeat infections, are more likely to get, for example, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, dementia, depression, mental health problems, prolonged fatigue and muscle pain… inability to go back to their usual state of functioning. This is the big difference between a common cold and Covid. So I would say let’s not take it lightly. If you can avoid the infection, much better to avoid it than to get it and risk the after-effects of long Covid.”