Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Global health watchdog World Health Organization on Monday warned against jumping to conclusions about a new Covid-19 virus discovered in India, saying it had not yet classified it as ‘worrying’.
According to the WHO, a variant is considered worrying if it spreads more easily, causes more serious cases of the disease, bypasses the immune system, or reduces the effectiveness of known treatments.
A WHO spokeswoman said that it was not clear at this point to what extent the new variant was responsible for the rapid increase in cases in India in recent months, media reports from Geneva said. The new variant was first detected in India on December 1, 2020.
Factors like festivals and other events with many participants may have only accelerated infections, she said. The British variant, which infects many people in a short time, may also be affecting India’s epidemiological situation.
In India, over 350,000 infections were reported within 24 hours on Monday, more than any country has reported in that time span. With its over 1.3 billion inhabitants, India has recorded a total of more than 17 million infections.
Although the number of infections has increased manifold, the overall mortality rate has remained under 1.3 percent, among the lowest in the world.
The three leading strains, called the British, South African, and Brazilian variants, have all been classified by the WHO as “variants of concern.”
Overall, the number of reported infections per week has been increasing for nine weeks, while the number of reported deaths has been increasing for six weeks, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva on Monday.
“There were almost as many cases last week as in the first five months of the pandemic combined,” said Tedros. In India in particular, the situation is “more than heart-breaking.”
In India, since the rapid rise of the pandemic’s second wave in March, a section of the media blamed the NDA government’s ‘recklessness’ responsible for its spread and failure to contain it. Then, some reports in foreign media were cited back in the Indian media recently with the same purpose.
Experts say all varieties of coronaviruses, including influenza and Covid-19, lie low for the change of season to expand, infect and mutate. Their most active season for expansion is spring.
And they do not have a political agenda!