By Suresh Perera

Amidst the raging Covid-19 pandemic, which has now swept across all districts of the country, medical experts have expressed concern over the possibility of the devastating variant of the virus that has killed thousands of people in India sneaking into Sri Lanka.

The strain surging in many parts of India was found to be at least 15 times more virulent than the earlier ones. This meant it spreads even faster, has a shorter incubation period and the transmission of the infection is more rapid within the human body, according to medical officials.

“There’s a risk of the highly infectious Indian variant slipping into Sri Lanka”, says Dr. Sudath Samaraweera, Director of the Epidemiology Unit of the Health Ministry.

“The viral strains are under analysis and we are awaiting a report on the outcome”, he told The Sunday Island.

In a bid to mitigate the risk, the Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lanka (CAASL) decided to disallow Indian passengers from entering Sri Lanka with immediate effect.

CAASL Additional Director General P. A. Jayakantha said the temporary prohibition was put in place to prevent the Covid-19 virus entering the country from the Indian subcontinent.

He further said the restrictions were applied following guidelines by the Health Ministry until the next evaluation. “We have issued notice to all airlines to prevent passengers from India disembarking”.

Covid-19 infections have witnessed a steady escalation with numbers topping 1,000 per day since last week. By Wednesday, positive cases stood at 1,895 with Colombo district heading the list with 498 followed by 387 in the Gampaha district.

With the latest figures, the total number of Corona patients in the country as shot up to 119,424. But 810 patients recovered and were discharged from hospitals on Thursday bringing the total number of recoveries so far to 100,885.

Medical experts predicted that infections will cross the 2,000 mark per day as the third wave of the deadly contagion continued to rage despite concerted efforts by health authorities to arrest the alarming trend.

The number of Corona-related deaths have also climbed with 14 reported by mid week. The total number of deaths so far is 734.

With medical facilities overwhelmed, the Health Ministry has also drawn in 5,000 beds in Ayurveda hospitals to treat Covid-19 patients as infections surged. The Army has moved in to augment the existing bed capacity by building additional temporary quarantine facilities to house the galloping infection numbers. Many tourist hotels are also being used as temporary quarantine centres.

Health officials warned that patients with comorbidities (the presence of two or more diseases or medical conditions in a patient), young children and pregnant mothers should take all necessary safety precautions as they are more susceptible to the mutant identified as the UK B117 variant.

There could be more asymptomatic patients within the community than the numbers already diagnosed Covid-19 positive. Those who have undergone PCR screening should remain at home until the outcome is known to prevent infecting others, they noted.

It is also important to cut down unnecessary travel as the next two weeks will be critical in containing the pandemic situation before it gets out of control, they warned.

Under guidelines issued by the Director-General of Health Services (DGHS), all cinemas, restaurants and clubs have been prohibited from selling liquor until further notice. Tourist hotels and rest houses have been permitted to serve liquor to guests only until 10.00 pm while liquor stores can open at the scheduled time for retail sales.

In an interesting observation, Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut, says a virus replicates by hijacking its host’s cellular machinery to make copies of itself. But like a person making mistakes when they type out the same sentence over and over, the genetic copies accumulate small errors, or mutations.

“Many changes don’t affect the virus’ function, and some even harm SARS-CoV-2’s ability to multiply, but they keep happening. Viruses mutate; that’s what they do”, he noted.