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India fears new wave as Omicron cases spread

Published : Thursday, 30 December, 2021 at 12:00 AM  Count : 803

NEW DELHI, Dec 29: The Omicron variant of the coronavirus is raising fears of a third wave of the pandemic in India. The country on Wednesday reported a total of nearly 800 Omicron cases, while COVID-19 infections rose by 9,195 new daily cases - a 44 percent spike from the previous day.
India's capital New Delhi has reported the highest 238 Omicron cases so far, while the western state of Maharashtra, which witnessed a brutal second wave of COVID-19 earlier this year, registered 167 cases, according to government data.
New Delhi banned large gatherings for Christmas and New Year, and many other states have announced new restrictions, including night curfews and vaccination requirements at stores and restaurants.
"The (coronavirus) cases have increased with the arrival of international flights," Delhi government's Health Minister Satyendar Jain said. "Not a single Omicron patient has required oxygen support so far."
Rajesh Tope, the health minister of Maharashtra, home to India's financial capital Mumbai, said it was "worrying to see the number of active cases increasing in the state". "Mumbai's positivity rate is at 4 percent. If this goes above 5 percent, then we will have to think about imposing restrictions," he told India's ANI news agency.
In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, also one of the worst-hit during the second COVID wave, authorities reported "an increasing trend" in infections. Police in the state's main city of Chennai have restricted New Year's celebrations in hotels and public places. In neighbouring Karnataka, a night curfew from 10pm to 5am was imposed until January 7.
However, despite rain and wintry weather in New Delhi, thousands of people flocked to markets during the holiday season, many without masks. At the usually busy Chandni Chowk market in the older quarters of the city, cycle rickshaw driver Mahesh Kumar said he is afraid of passengers who do not believe in the existence of the virus.
Businessman Mohammad Saqib said many feared a spike in infections as a lot of people lost loved ones in the devastating second wave of infections in India earlier this year, which killed hundreds of thousands.
Officials fear another wave, bringing in a round of travel restrictions, expanding mass screening at airports and sending out public health warnings, experts say. COVID-19 centres that had gone into hiatus are making a return with isolation wards ready to take in patients.
But New Year's festivities are around the corner, and a spate of state elections early next year could allow the virus to advance quickly. New Delhi announced last week that samples of all COVID-19 positive cases will be sent for genome sequencing at two government labs, going beyond screening for the variant at airports.     -AL JAZEERA
But not all cities or states have the bandwidth to sequence all positive cases. Currently, 38 government labs across India can carry out genome sequencing. But it is still not close to analysing five percent of all samples, the ideal standard.
India may see a spurt in the Covid-19 growth rate within days and head into an intense but short-lived virus wave as the highly-infectious omicron variant moves through the crowded nation of almost 1.4 billion.
"It is likely that India will see a period of explosive growth in daily cases and that the intense growth phase will be relatively short," Paul Kattuman, professor at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge which has developed a Covid-19 India tracker, wrote in an email. "New infections will begin to rise in a few days, possibly within this week," he said, adding that it was hard to predict how high the daily cases could go.
Kattuman and his team of researchers, developers of the India Covid tracker, are seeing a sharp rise in infection rates across India. The tracker spotlighted six states as a "significant concern" in a Dec. 24 note, with adjusted growth rate of new cases exceeding 5%. This had expanded to 11 Indian states by Dec. 26, according to the tracker, which corrects for "day of the week effects" and other variations.
India added 9,195 Covid cases Wednesday --the highest new daily cases in three weeks -- pushing the total confirmed tally to 34.8 million infections. The total number of fatalities so far is 480,592 deaths. The country is already gearing up to prevent another massive outbreak even though only 781 cases of the highly-mutated omicron have been identified so far.
Last week, it allowed booster shots and included teenagers aged 15 to 18 in the inoculation program. Two more vaccines as well as antiviral pill molnupiravir, developed by Merck & Co. with partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics LP, were approved by the local drug regulator Tuesday.
New Delhi closed cinemas, schools and gyms and introduced restrictions on public gathering on Tuesday -- a day after it reported the most new cases in more than four months. Night curfew kicks in from 10 p.m to 5 a.m. and bars, restaurants as well as offices will have 50% occupancy. Mumbai, the country's financial capital, also reported a surge in new cases to 1,377 on Tuesday.
These policy decisions underscore hard lessons India learned after a deadly delta-led virus wave in April and May that pushed infections to a record-beating 400,000-plus each day. It overwhelmed the country's hospitals and crematoriums and left its citizens pleading for oxygen and other medical resources on social-media platforms.
The Cambridge India tracker had correctly called the peak of this devastating second wave in May and also forecast in August that India would see a slow burn in its Covid infections curve until the vaccination coverage was sufficiently high. India crossed 1 billion administered vaccine doses in October and new cases plunged in tandem with that milestone.
AL JAZEERA









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