Omicron: A newly identified COVID-19 variant --- B.1.1.529 --- is causing an increase in new COVID-19 infections in South Africa alerting several countries, including India and the United Kingdom.
A sub-lineage of the Delta variant of COVID-19, AY.4.2, has been detected in the United Kingdom, China, and Russia, and now it has made its way to India.
The new variant 'Mu' has mutations that indicate a risk of resistance to vaccines and stressed that further studies were needed to better understand it, said WHO.
The doctor, despite being fully vaccinated, got infected with both Alpha and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2, and the RMRC lab detected the double infection in the patient in May.
The top health research institute said that an adjuvant developed with funding from the NIH has contributed to the success of the "highly efficacious" COVAXIN COVID-19 vaccine, which roughly 25 million people have received to date in India and elsewhere.
The UN body routinely assesses if variants of SARS-CoV-2 result in changes in transmissibility and severity, or if they lead to changes in public health and social measures'' implementation by national health authorities.
The B-1617 variant of the coronavirus, first identified in India, has been classified as a “variant of concern” at the global level by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The B.1.617 variant of SARS-CoV2 or the 'Indian strain', feared to be contributing to a surge in coronavirus cases in India, has been designated as the Variants of Interest (VOI) by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the UN health agency said in its weekly epidemiological update last month.
The state was facing more challenges in the present second wave, as the pathogen strain was more virulent and was spreading fast, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan told reporters here.
Dismissing media reports that N440K is the variant causing chaos in Visakhapatnam and other parts of Andhra Pradesh, Divya Tej Sowpati a scientist at CCMB said while N440K was indeed a mutation of concern in South India during and after the first wave, current data show it is replaced by new variants such as B1617 and B117.
As per reports, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) Advisor Rakesh Mishra said that the N440K strain which was present in the samples of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana will fade away soon.
With the pandemic threatening to stay longer, it is felt that other medicine systems should be explored to curb its spread to help the nation and its people get back on track faster.
Up till April 27, B1617 variant had been detected in over 1,200 sequences uploaded on the open-access database GISAID (the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data) "from at least 17 countries", the global health agency said in its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic.
On March second week in Delhi 28 per cent of samples had the UK variant and in the fourth week of March the percentage scaled up to 50 per cent, National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) data reveals.
A possible new variant of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has been detected in several regions of Brazil, the Ministry of Science and Technology's National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC) said.
Pfizer has said it believes its current vaccine is highly likely to still protect against the South African variant.
Bengal currently has 3,213 active cases. As many as 19,665 samples were tested in the state over the past 24 hours, raising the total number of such clinical examinations to 86,78,594.
The variant, which was first found in Manaus, Brazil, appears to be more contagious than other COVID-19 strains. It can potentially be contracted by someone who was already infected or who has been vaccinated.
There are more than 7,000 coronavirus mutations in India of which some could pose a serious risk, a senior scientist said on Monday. Rakesh Mishra, Director of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research – Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, said among the variants, N440K is spreading a lot more in the southern states.
The Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CSIR-CCMB) said there is emerging evidence that coronavirus variant N440K is spreading "a lot more" in southern states in the country.
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