Delta poses over 2 times risk of hospitalisation than Alpha Covid variant: Lancet
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, August 28
Patients with the delta variant of concern have more than two times the risk of hospital admission versus those with the alpha variant, suggest new findings from the UK, where Delta remains the predominant driver of Covid-19 upsurge, much like in India.
The study published in the Lancet today has ramifications for India, where the National Centre for Disease Control recently showed 90 per cent genome sequenced samples carrying the highly transmissible delta.
The latest study — the largest whole-genome-sequencing dataset for SARS-CoV-2 in a high-income country to date — found Delta was associated with over two times the risk of hospitalisation than alpha.
“Patients with the delta variant had more than two times the risk of hospital admission compared with patients with the alpha variant. Emergency care attendance combined with hospital admission was also higher for patients with the delta variant, showing increased use of emergency care services as well as inpatient hospitalisation,” found the study that covered 43,338 sequencing-confirmed cases of alpha and delta variants in England from March 29 to May 23, 2021.
Silver lining in the research is — when studied by vaccination status, only the unvaccinated had a significantly higher risk with 74 per cent of those hospitalised unvaccinated.
“Our results suggest that outbreaks of the delta variant in unvaccinated populations might lead to a greater burden on healthcare services than with the alpha variant,” the authors say, in major implications for India, where Delta is the dominant variant and vaccine pace is low.
The results from the UK suggest India must move fast to cover unvaccinated populations, aiming for 1 crore doses every day, after hitting the record yesterday.
India has so far received 50 per cent coverage of the adult population with at least one dose but the fully vaccinated cohort remains much lower.
Delta variant of concern originated in India in December, 2020 and is now the fastest spreading globally. Following previous waves of Covid-19 in India, the number of confirmed cases and test positivity in India, driven by Delta, rapidly increased, with the latter reaching 30 per cent by the end of April 2021, contributing to the ferocious second wave.
