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Option Accelerating India’s Covid Blast: WHO Senior Scientist | India News

 


GENEVA: A Covid-19 variant that is spreading in India is more contagious and may be avoiding vaccine protection, contributing to the country’s explosive eruption, the World Health Organization scientist said on Saturday.
In an interview with AFP, Soumya Swaminathan warned that “the epidemiological features we see in India today show that it is a very rapidly spreading variant”.
India on Saturday for the first time recorded more than 4,000 deaths from Covid-19 in just 24 hours and more than 400,000 new infections.
New Delhi has tried to contain the blast, which has overloaded its healthcare system, and many experts suspect official deaths and case numbers are a gross underestimation.
Swaminathan, an Indian pediatrician and clinical clinical scientist, said the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19, which was first discovered in India last October, was clearly a contributing factor to the catastrophe that was erupting in her homeland.
“There have been a lot of accelerators getting into this,” the 62-year-old said, noting that “a virus that spreads faster is one of them.”
The WHO recently listed B.1.617 – which lists several sub-lines with slightly different mutations and characteristics – as a “variant of interest”.
But so far he has not stopped adding it to his short list of “variant of concern” – a label that indicates it is more dangerous than the original version of the virus being more contagious, deadly or more capable of get past vaccine protection.
Several national health authorities, including the United States and Britain, have meanwhile said they consider B.1.617 a variant of concern, and Swaminathan said she expected the WHO to follow suit soon.
“B 1.617 is likely to be a variant of concern because there are some mutations that increase transmission and which can also potentially make it resistant to antibodies generated by vaccination or by natural infection,” she said.
But she insisted the single variant could not be blamed for the dramatic rise in cases and deaths inflicted on India, complaining that the country appeared to have removed its guard, with “great social unrest and large gatherings”.
Massive election rallies held by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other politicians have been blamed in part for the dizzying rise in infections.
But even when many in India feel the crisis was over, removing masks and other protective measures, the virus is spreading silently.
“In a big country like India, you can have low-level broadcasting, which is what happened for many months,” Swaminathan said.
“It was endemic (and) probably gradually increased,” she said, stating that “those early signs were lost until it reached the point at which it was rising vertically.”
“At that point it is very difficult to suppress, because then tens of thousands of people are involved and it multiplies at a rate at which it is very difficult to stop.”
As India is now trying to increase vaccination to curb the outbreak, Swaminathan warned that the strikes alone would not be enough to gain control of the situation.
She pointed out that India, the world’s largest nation that makes vaccines, had fully vaccinated about two percent of the 1.3 billion plus population.
“It will take many months if not years to reach the point of 70 to 80 percent coverage,” she said.
With that perspective, Swaminathan stressed that “for the foreseeable future, we must depend on our proven and tested public and social health measures” to reduce transmission.
Growth in India is frightening not only because of the appalling number of people who are sick and dying there, but also because the number of infection that breaks out dramatically increases the chances of new and more dangerous variants emerging.
“The more the virus replicates, spreads and transmits, the more likely it is that … mutations will develop and adapt,” Swaminathan said.
“Variants that accumulate a lot of mutations can ultimately become resistant to the current vaccines we have,” she warned.
“This is going to be a problem for the whole world.”

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