The par­al­lel health care sys­tem can come crash­ing down if the num­ber of COVID-19 pos­i­tive cas­es in the coun­try con­tin­ues to rise.

Cit­i­zens are be­ing re­mind­ed that med­ical re­sources are lim­it­ed, not just in terms of the num­ber of avail­able beds, but al­so med­ical per­son­nel.

And Pro­fes­sor Har­i­ha­ran See­tara­man, of the Crit­i­cal Care Med­ical De­part­ment at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, is warn­ing against com­pla­cen­cy.

“We do not have the re­sources.  It’s not just the phys­i­cal beds alone,” he says. “We don’t have the re­sources to take care of pa­tients, and that hap­pened at one point in time, and we don’t want a col­lapse to hap­pen.”

“There can be a pos­si­bil­i­ty that the Delta vari­ant is re­spon­si­ble for this sud­den change in the graph show­ing in­fec­tions,” he ob­serves.  “I must say again that we should not be­come too re­laxed un­til we de­vel­op ‘herd im­mu­ni­ty’.”

He warned: “Once we start get­ting pa­tients with the Delta vari­ant in the ICU set­ting, it is go­ing to be re­al­ly dis­as­trous.  I have en­coun­tered sit­u­a­tions where we could not ac­com­mo­date pa­tients who re­quired even oxy­gen—for­get about ven­ti­la­tors and oth­er life sup­port.  Some­times we get an over­flow like that and that is a dis­as­ter and I do not want that to hap­pen.”

“Again, I would im­plore the pub­lic not to be com­pla­cent,” he added.

Pro­fes­sor See­tara­man says while the ef­fi­ca­cy of the vac­cines has de­clined with some of the COVID-19 vari­ants, the vac­cines are still ef­fec­tive in re­duc­ing the risks.

“We are not ad­ver­tis­ing the vac­cines—we are talk­ing about sci­ence. We’ve had the HIV pan­dem­ic for more than 25 years and we could not de­vel­op a vac­cine—that is sci­ence.  But we could de­vel­op a vac­cine for this par­tic­u­lar pan­dem­ic, COVID-19.  And there is a lot of sci­en­tif­ic in­for­ma­tion com­ing in,” he points out.

“I know that with the Delta vari­ant the ef­fi­ca­cy of the vac­cine has gone down but it has not gone down to a mis­er­able lev­el,” he notes.  “Al­so, there are many stud­ies which have es­tab­lished that we have lots of dif­fer­ent types of im­mu­ni­ty.”

Ac­cord­ing to Pro­fes­sor See­tara­man, for the un­vac­ci­nat­ed per­son, when the coro­n­avirus that caus­es COVID-19 dis­ease hits their body, they go in­to a cy­tokine storm—a very se­vere im­muno­log­i­cal re­ac­tion—that at­tacks all their or­gans, in­clud­ing the lungs.

“When a per­son is vac­ci­nat­ed, they de­vel­op a dif­fer­ent kind of cell-me­di­at­ed im­mu­ni­ty so that they do not have a hy­per-re­ac­tion to the coro­n­avirus, and that is how it is pre­vent­ing hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tion and ICU care,” he ex­plains.

He is urg­ing the pub­lic to trust the sci­ence and take the vac­cine, even though there is a small risk of break­through in­fec­tions.  He says once the coun­try reach­es herd im­mu­ni­ty, the sit­u­a­tion will be­come much bet­ter.