Gagandeep Kang on Saturday stated that “we got really lucky" with the new Omicron variant despite it having a growth advantage over Delta. “We got really lucky with Omicron because of a phenomenon known as epistasis where the background of mutations influences how genes actually work," Kang said during a webinar titled 'Omicron: Enigma or End?'. "We wound up with the virus while it was capable of immune evasion of a level we have never seen before.
But it did not result in the severity that we saw before. That's not to say nobody got sick but the proportion was less," she added.
Kang said that when the new strain was sequenced, it had caused major concern due to the number of mutations. It has caused the most recent surge in Covid-19 cases across the globe. “When Omicron was first sequenced, there was a lot of concerns over Omicron because of the number of mutations and also because we did not understand how a virus with so many mutations could have evaded surveillance around the globe.
There are multiple theories about how Omicron came," she said. Cases plateauing But bringing hope amidst the grim times, IIT professor Maninder Agarwal, who has been tracking the movement of the waves, said the peak of the third wave in India is already behind us. “Now the wave will go down.