A new variant of COVID-19 has been detected in India, health officials in the nation said on Wednesday.
Indian Ministry of Health officials and experts warned against linking the variants with an ongoing surge in new infections in India.
Cases in India had been plummeting since September and life was returning to normal.
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However, infections began spiking last month and more than 47,000 new cases were detected on Wednesday, along with 275 deaths — the highest one-day death toll in more than four months.
The virus has been mutating throughout the pandemic. Most mutations are trivial, but scientists have been investigating which ones might make the virus spread more easily or make people sicker.
Three variants first detected in South Africa, the UK and Brazil are considered the most worrisome, and have been designated “variants of concern.”
The three variants were found in 7 percent of the nearly 11,000 samples that India has sequenced since Dec. 30 last year.
The most widespread of these was the variant that was detected in the UK last year.
The new variant found in India has two mutations in the spike protein that the virus uses to fasten itself to cells, said Rakesh Mishra, director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, one of the 10 research institutes sequencing the virus.
These genetic tweaks could be of concern, as they might help the virus spread more easily and escape the immune system, Mishra said, adding that the variant should not be linked to the surge.
The ministry said in a statement that the variant was found in 15 to 20 percent of the samples sequenced from Maharashtra.
The state, which is home to India’s financial capital, has been worst hit by the recent surge and accounts for more than 60 percent of all active cases in India.
In Maharashtra’s Nagpur, the infections caused by the new variant were in those parts of the city that had, so far, been least affected, said Sujeet Singh, director of the National Centre for Disease Control in New Delhi.
“The susceptible pool of population ... was substantially large,” Singh said.
Meanwhile, health officials said that they were worried about upcoming festivals, many of which mark the advent of the spring.
The Indian government has written to states to consider imposing restrictions, but many celebrants have defied social distancing and disease-prevention protocols.
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