The number of recorded COVID-19 infections in India yesterday climbed above 24 million amid reports that a highly transmissible mutant strain first detected in the country was spreading across the globe.
The Indian B.1.617 variant of the virus has been detected in eight countries of the Americas, including Canada and the US, said Jairo Mendez, a WHO infectious diseases expert.
The mutant strain has also been detected in the UK, as well as in Singapore.
Photo: EPA-EFE
In the Americas, people infected with the variant included travelers in Panama and Argentina who had arrived from India or Europe.
In the Caribbean, cases of the Indian variant have been detected in Aruba, the Dutch territory of St Maarten and the French department of Guadeloupe.
“These variants have a greater capacity for transmission, but so far, we have not found any collateral consequences,” Mendez said. “The only worry is that they spread faster.”
Public Health England said that the total number of confirmed cases of the variant had more than doubled in the past week to 1,313 across the UK.
“We are anxious about it — it has been spreading,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, adding that there would be meetings to discuss what to do.
“We’re ruling nothing out,” he said.
The Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare nationwide recorded 4,000 deaths and 343,144 infections in within 24 hours yesterday.
It was the third consecutive day of 4,000 or more deaths, but daily infections have stayed below a peak of 414,188 last week.
While the total number of recorded infections in India crossed 24 million, the number of people confirmed to have died from COVID-19 stood at 262,317 since the pandemic first struck India more than a year ago.
However, a lack of testing in many places meant that a lot of deaths and infections were omitted from the official count, and experts say that the real numbers could be five to 10 times higher.
Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiology professor at the University of Michigan, said that most models predicted a peak this week, adding that India could be seeing signs of that trend.
Still, the number of new cases each day is large enough to overwhelm hospitals, Mukherjee said on Twitter on Thursday.
“The key word is cautious optimism,” she wrote.
The situation is particularly bad in rural areas of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with a population of more than 240 million. Television pictures have shown families weeping over the dead in rural hospitals or camping in wards to tend the sick.
Bodies have been washed up in the Ganges River, which flows through vast parts of northern India, including Uttar Pradesh, as crematoriums are overwhelmed and wood for funeral pyres is in short supply.
A second wave of COVID-19 infections, which erupted in February, has been accompanied by a slowdown in vaccinations, although Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that vaccinations would be open to all adults from May 1.
The country is the world’s
largest vaccine producer, but has run low on stocks in the face of huge demand. As of Thursday, it had fully vaccinated just about 38.2 million people, or about 2.8 percent of a population of about 1.35 billion, Indian government data show.
More than 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines would likely be available in India from August to December, V.K.Paul, a pediatrician who advises the government, told reporters amid criticism that Modi had mishandled the vaccine plan.
Those doses would include 750 million of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, as well as 550 million doses of Covaxin, which was developed by Indian firm Bharat Biotech.
“We are going through a phase of finite supply,” Paul said “It takes time to come out of this phase.”
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