Covid-19 Here to Stay Till 2021, Aggressive Testing Needed to Curb Its Spread: Health Experts

New Delhi: ‘COVID-19 vaccine will come by next year’, Harvard health expert Professor Ashish Jha said, while interacting with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday, as part of the series aired on grand old party social media channels. Professor Johan Giesecke  a well-known Swedish physician and Professor Emeritus at the Karolinska Institute at Stockholm also talked about the COVID-19 pandemic. He asserted that no country thought of exit strategy prior to announcing the lockdown.

While Jha exuded confidence that a vaccine will be available in a year’s time, Prof Giesecke said India should practice a lockdown that is as ‘soft’ as possible, ‘as a severe lockdown will ruin its economy very quickly’.

Jha, a professor of Global Health at TH Chan School of Public Health and Director, Harvard Global Health institute, claimed that coronavirus is a ’12-18 months’ problem and the world is not going to be free of this till 2021. He also called for the need for aggressive testing strategy for high-risk areas.