India must be prepared for another Covid outbreak

New Delhi : India must be prepared for another Covid-19 outbreak, said an expert on Friday, amid rise in cases in several countries including the US and South Korea.

According to estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Covid infections are increasing across 25 states in the country. South Korea is also seeing an outbreak with a significant number of related hospitalisations.

The latest update from the World Health Organization (WHO) showed that between June 24 and July 21, an average of 17,358 Covid specimens were tested for SARS-CoV-2 every week across 85 countries.

India also witnessed 908 new Covid-19 cases, and two deaths between June and July this year, as per the WHO.

“While the situation isn't severe in India as in the other countries, we need to be really prepared for it,” Professor Deepak Sehgal, Virologist at the Shiv Nadar University in Noida, told IANS.

“The virus has certainly reemerged. And the WHO reported that there have been around 26 per cent of the deaths and 11 per cent increase in the occurrence of this virus. And that is quite alarming,” he added.

The recent outbreak is driven by KP variants -- belonging to the Omicron lineage. Omicron was highly transmissible and showed great immune escape. First identified globally in January, KP.2 is a descendant of Omicron’s JN.1. In India, KP.2 was first detected in December 2023 in Odisha.

KP strains are the derivatives of the Omicron variant with three mutations in the spike region, Sehgal said.

Data from INSACOG (Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium), showed that the variant is already in circulation in India. KP.x -- which includes KP.3.1.1 and its relatives such as the FLiRT variant or KP.2 -- account for nearly 39 per cent of all Covid sequence samples in India collected in the last week of July.

Meanwhile, the Union Health Ministry’s Covid dashboard showed that several states in India are seeing an increase in Covid cases -- with 279 active cases.

Assam, New Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh are experiencing a rise in infections.

According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), the highly transmissible

KP.1 and KP.2 strains, which evolved from the JN.1 Omicron variant, are responsible for the surge in Covid cases in India.

However, there has been no increase in hospitalisations or severity of illness so far, Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda informed Parliament in July.

Sehgal said the “government has stepped surveillance, particularly with genome sequencing”.

Efforts are also being made to ensure that vaccines and booster doses are readily available in the population.

“We can have one dose of a booster vaccine that would really help. Otherwise, there are quite a number of risks that we would need to mitigate in future”, the expert said.