Good research and analysis always, saves the day in such times of misinformation and fake news. We Aryaanites had the privilege to meet the champion of the research in Coronavirus and allied fields and the nodal officer for Covid vaccinations in Goa Dr. Jagdish Cacodcar
Doctor started off by asking us the vital question whether we were going to resume physical classes and our director said very wisely that only the few students would be called to perform the practical’s in school otherwise the online classes would continue till the students were perfectly vaccinated. Doctor said that such a hybrid system would turn out to be the truth of the future as the corona virus was an RNA virus and it never had permanent genetic structure and keeps mutating and changing its genetic structure, this grants the virus a chance at immortality and helps it prevail for the longest times amongst the humans. This feature of constant replication and mutation makes it difficult for the vaccines to be manufactured additionally it also makes it extremely difficult to estimate how the course of the pandemic can change, and how drastically, because one strain of a mutant that is resistant to the vaccines in circulation and to the innate immunity that the humans have, could give birth to hell from nowhere. So, he pointed out that merely having taken the vaccine doses will not grant us a safety field against Covid-19 it was rather necessary that we take meticulous precautions even after vaccination because one resistant strain would be enough to drive us cray-cray again and push us into our homes.
Doctor briefly educated us about the masks that have now become inseparable in our lives to such an extent that the way we mask ourselves has come to define our fate and health, thus, it made knowing the dynamics of the mask very significant. Doctor began by addressing the most naïve tendency of the people to wear a surgical or cloth mask on top of an N-95 mask he said that it hampered the working of the mask and predisposed the individual to the virus. The N-95 masks has an electrostatic filter that separated the virus and dust particles and the cloth mask worn, disrupted this mechanism. Instead, we must either resort to wearing a double mask or a single N-95 mask in public spaces.
More than a vaccine, he said, it was our resort to protecting ourselves and those around us from this microscopic beast, and taking appropriate actions of sanitizing regularly and masking up and maintaining a proper 6 feet distance from all fellow citizens.
Nandini Rangnekar,
11th REG