Spike in COVID-19 cases- Prompting fears of second wave?

New Delhi, March 26: India on Thursday recorded 53,476 new COVID-19 cases, marking the highest single-day rise in cases since October 23, according to the Indian Ministry of Health. The country has been reporting more than 35,000 new cases daily for over a week in a recent surge in cases after they fell in January and February this year.

 

The rise in cases comes as the country's top researchers announced that there are nearly 800 variants of concern present in the country. The Indian SARS-CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics which has been carrying out genome sequencing and analysis of coronavirus strains since December says 771 cases of variants of concern have been detected in India. Most of the cases are the coronavirus variant first identified in the UK, according to a statement from the Indian Ministry of Health on Wednesday.

 

 

While the Health Ministry has not correlated these to the recent rise in cases, these variants have been primarily detected in states such as Punjab and Maharashtra, two states that the health ministry has called states of grave concern, given that they are contributing to most of the nation's case load. The Health Ministry has said "such mutations confer immune escape and increased infectivity," while adding that further analysis is being conducted.

 

 

The country's first wave of infections started climbing last summer and peaked in September, with numbers slowly declining since then. By February, the number of daily cases had fallen by nearly 90%, to about 10,000 a day. But by the start of March, it became clear that cases were slowly on the increase again and they have exploded in the past few weeks. India has now reported a total of more than 11.7 million cases and 160,000 related deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

 

 

 

 

In the meantime, the authorities are working to control the spike by implementing new restrictions and stepping up the country's vaccine program. India is administering two vaccines domestically. One is Covishield, a vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca and produced by the Serum Institute of India, the world's largest

vaccine maker.

 

 

The other is India's first homegrown coronavirus vaccine, Covaxin, developed jointly by Bharat Biotech and the government-run Indian Council of Medical Research. So far, India has administered more than 50 million doses of vaccines, with more than 8.1 million people fully vaccinated.

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