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- India on Wednesday reported 58,097 new cases and 534 fatalities, taking the cumulative caseload to 35,018,358 (214,004 active cases) and fatalities to 482,551.
- Worldwide: Over 295.6 million cases and over 5.47 million fatalities.
- Vaccination in India: 1,477,208,846 doses. Worldwide: Over 9.25 billion doses.
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| TODAY’S TAKE |
| Should you worry about the IHU variant? |
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- The WHO said the new coronavirus variant found in France hasn’t become much of a threat since it was first identified in November. The variant “has been on our radar”, said Abdi Mahamud, a WHO incident manager on Covid. “That virus had a lot of chances to pick up.”
- Tell me more: The variant — a sub-lineage of the B.1.640 and with 46 mutations and 37 deletions in its genetic code — was identified in 12 people in the southern Alps around the same time that Omicron was discovered in South Africa last year.
- The latter mutation has since travelled the globe and kindled record levels of contagion, unlike the French one that researchers at the IHU Mediterranee Infection — helmed by scientist Didier Raoult — nicknamed IHU.
- The first patient identified with the IHU variant was vaccinated and had just returned from Cameroon, the hospital’s researchers wrote in a paper published on the medRxiv server in late December where they first drew attention to the atypical mutations.
- Note: Raoult stirred controversy in the early stages of the pandemic by recommending treatment with hydroxychloroquine.
- And so: It’s “too early to speculate on virological, epidemiological or clinical features of this IHU variant based on these 12 cases”, the IHU researchers wrote in the article, which hasn’t been peer reviewed.
- The WHO monitors multiple variants, and when it finds one may pose a significant risk, it declares it a “variant of concern”. This one is only under investigation.
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| TELL ME ONE THING |
| Why curtailing Omicron’s spread is important |
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- Observing that “the more Omicron spreads, the more it transmits”, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) senior emergencies officer Catherine Smallwood, in an interview to AFP, warned that “the more it replicates, the more likely it is to throw out a new variant.” Noting that “Omicron is lethal” and that “it can cause death… maybe a little bit less than Delta”, Smallwood added that “who’s to say what the next variant might throw out.”
- The WHO’s warning comes even as fresh concerns have been raised over another variant — known as IHU or B.1.640 — which is said to have 46 mutations in its spike protein, compared to 36 in the Omicron variant. The IHU variant however has been around for some time now, with first reports about its presence appearing way back in January 2021.
- Conceding that while “on an individual level there’s probably a decreased risk of hospitalisation” from an Omicron infection, vis-a-vis the Delta variant, the WHO however says that Omicron could be a bigger threat than Delta because of the number of cases. Smallwood cites the example of Europe which saw more than 5 million cases in the last week of 2021, which, she said, was a pointer that they were in “a very dangerous phase” and the full impact of which is as yet unclear.
- Sounding an ominous warning, she said that when “cases rise so significantly, that’s likely to generate a lot more people with severe disease, ending up in hospital and possibly going on to die.” That warning comes amidst reports that the US saw an all-time high in the number of new infections, which crossed the 1-million mark, with 1,080,211 new Covid-19 cases being reported on Monday.
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Written by: Rakesh Rai, Judhajit Basu, Sumil Sudhakaran, Tejeesh Nippun Singh
Research: Rajesh Sharma
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