300 Covid-19 variants so far, recent ones mild: Expert | Pune News – Times of India

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PUNE: India, since the start of Covid, has detected nearly 300 different variants of SARS-CoV-2, but in the last 12 months, there hasn’t been a version of the virus responsible for serious disease, a top official from the National Centre for Disease Control said on Saturday.
Dr Sujeet Kumar Singh, principal advisor to the NCDC and a member of the Indian SARS-CoV2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG), said many different strains of the virus are currently circulating in the country. However, he added that critical indicators such as hospitalisation levels and test positivity rates have remained low.

300 nCoV variants so far, recent ones mild: Expert

“India’s Covid test positivity rate is currently less than 0.1%. Genomic surveillance of hospitalised cases is still going on, but caseload over the last one month has been low,” Dr Singh said, adding that most of the 300 variants detected have been versions or offshoots of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.
Only a month ago the health ministry had called for heightened surveillance due to the Covid surges in China and a few other countries. But the threat to India seems to be minimal, one scientist said, attributing that to widespread vaccine coverage and good immunity levels.
“India has had almost every version of Omicron in circulation. But none of them caused spikes similar to the ones that happened in some parts of the world,” said the expert, who also ruled out the possibility of dangerous new mutations emerging in the virus after the China outbreak.
“So far, we haven’t detected any variant that we think has surge potential,” the scientist said.
The government has been conducting RT-PCR tests of travellers returning from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Thailand and South Korea. It has also mandated the filing of the ‘Air Suvidha’ forms, making an RT-PCR test (72 hours before the trip) compulsory for those entering from these six countries.
Dr Singh said genomic sampling of seriously ill Covid patients is being carried out in all states, despite the drop in caseload.
Over the last few days, India has been reporting only around 100 new Covid cases in a day.
SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.1.529 was renamed ‘Omicron’ by the WHO on November 26, 2021, after it was found with a substantial number of mutations.
Omicron went on to replace Delta as the most dominant strain of the virus within just four weeks. By March, 2022, the WHO estimated that almost 90% of the global population had some antibodies against Covid-19.

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