SunstarTV Bureau: Rajesh Bhushan Union Health Secretary and Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA) to the Government of India Prof K. Vijay Raghavan, held a press meet to inform about the corona status in the country.
An important development is the establishment of Indian Sars-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG), which is a consortium of 10 government labs across the country to do genome sequencing of COVID19 as well as any variant of that virus. These labs belong to ICMR, BioTech India, CSIR and Health Ministry, informed Rajesh Bhushan.
Prior to thenews of the UK variant came in, we had done roughly 5,000 genome sequences across labs. Now we’ll be significantly increasing that number and would be working in a coordinated manner, added Rajesh Bhusan.
Vaccines will work against the variants detected in UK and South Africa. There is no evidence that current vaccines will fail to protect against these COVID19 variants, assured Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA) to the Government of India, K. Vijay Raghavan.
If we analyse COVID19 cases on basis of gender, 63% of total cases were reported in males and 37% cases in females. Age-wise, 8% cases reported below age of 17 years, 13% in 18-25 years age group, 39% in 26-44 years group,26% in 45-60 years group and 14% above 60 years further added Union Health Secretary.
Active cases in the country are less than 2.7 lakhs and are declining. Positivity rate in the country during the last week stood at only 2.25%, informed Rajesh Bhushan.
