New Delhi: Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan has expressed hope that there would be ‘very significant control’ over Covid-19 by Deepavali, which will be celebrated on 14 November this year.
“Hopefully that in the next couple of months, maybe by Diwali time, we should have a very significant control over the coronavirus,” Harsh Vardhan said, while speaking at the Nation First webinar series organised by Ananthkumar Foundation.
The Minister said that experts like Dr Devi Prasad Shetty and Dr C N Manjunath will probably agree that after some time Covid-19 will also become endemic like many other viruses, which have come to the globe in the past.
“But the virus has taught us a certain lesson; it has taught us there has to be a new normal and we need to be more diligent about, more cautious, about our lifestyle,” he added.
He also expressed hope about having a vaccine against Covid-19 by the end of this year.
“We are not lagging behind anyone else in the whole world in our efforts to contribute towards the vaccine against Covid. In India, we have about 7-8 vaccine candidates, three of them in the clinical trial phases and rest in the pre-clinical trials and by the end of this year, we hope to be able to get a vaccine against Covid,” he said.