#In just a few weeks, the B.1.617 variant has become the dominant strain across India and has spread to about 40 nations, including the United Kingdom, Fiji and Singapore
RNS: The new coronavirus variants are responsible for this second wave which is highly contagious and fatal.
In an interview to AFP news agency, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO) said, the devastation in India is due to the new variant of Coronavirus B.1.617 which is spreading rapidly.
She said, B.1.617 is also mutating rapidly, which is proving to be life-threatening for the people. “Vaccination is the only way to avoid it. The vaccination campaign needs to be expedited earliest,” added Soumya.
She also said that not only the new variant of Corona can be blamed for the huge increase and death of infected people in India, but also the negligence of the people for this. People did not take care of the physical distance, while many also stopped wearing masks after the case was reduced.
Soumya also blamed that large scale election rallies organized by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other politicians are also responsible for this. The rally attracted millions of people, which helped it spread more quickly.
Though, studies are on in India to examine the variant’s transmissibility, the severity of the disease it causes and the response of antibodies in people who have been vaccinated, she said.
“More genome sequencing in India is urgently needed in a bid to get a full picture of what is going on in different parts of the country; it should be hand-in-hand with clinical epidemiological studies,” added Soumya.
“Sequencing does not give you the full picture. You do not know whether it is more transmissible, whether it causes more severe disease or what impact it has on your diagnostics,” she said.
Sujeet Singh, director of the National Centre for Disease Control, based in New Delhi, told journalists (on 5 May) that the B.1.617 variant was found in India in October, is now spreading among millions of people daily.
“In just a few weeks, the B.1.617 variant has become the dominant strain across India
and has spread to about 40 nations, including the United Kingdom, Fiji and Singapore,” he said.
Two weeks ago, it looked as if multiple variants were behind a series of surges in India. Genomic data indicated that B.1.1.7, first identified in the United Kingdom, was dominant in Delhi and the state of Punjab, and a new variant dubbed B.1.618 was present in West Bengal. B.1.617 was dominant in Maharashtra.
But since then, B.1.617 has overtaken B.1.618 in West Bengal, has become the leading variant in many states, and is increasing rapidly in Delhi. “In some states, the surge can be tied to 617,” added Sujeet.
