SunstarTV Bureau: At a time when India is reporting more fresh cases every day than most countries put together, the highly-powerful double mutant variant from the country has been traced to as many as 44 countries across the world, sparking fears of the potential impact of the pandemic in the days to come.
The World Health Organization on Wednesday said that the variant that is responsible for the acceleration of India’s devastating outbreak has been found in several countries now.
The UN health agency claimed that the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19, first detected in India in October last year, had been found in genome sequences uploaded to the GISAID open-access database “from 44 countries in all six WHO regions”, adding that it received “reports of detections from five additional countries”.
Outside India, Britain had reported the highest number of Covid-19 cases due to the variant.
The WHO earlier this week declared ‘B.1.617’ – that counts three sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics – as ‘variant of concern’, and added to the list of three other variants – the British, Brazilian and South African.
These variants of coronavirus are considered more dangerous than the original, novel version of the virus as these are either highly transmissible and deadly, or able to get past the wall of vaccine protection.
WHO also said that preliminary evidence stated that the double mutant variant was more resistant to treatment “with the monoclonal antibody Bamlanivimab”, and also indicated “limited reduction in neutralisation by antibodies”.
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The health agency stated that the outbreak of the B.1.617 variant, along with other severely transmittable strains, is one of the several factors worsening India’s overwhelming surge in new cases and deaths.
The ‘double mutant’ variant also leads to loss of neutralisation of antibodies but It’s modest, Anurag Agrawal, director of the Institute of Genomics And Integrative Biology, said on Tuesday, adding that vaccines are effective against it.
“The ability of loss of neutralisation of antibodies is modest but it is not much. It’s not the case that double mutation will have the double the loss of neutralisation. There is loss of neutralisation but it is not a huge amount. We expect the vaccines to still work even if theyv work a little bit less. They should prevent severe disease,” Agrawal said, according to news agency PTI.
India is the second-worst affected country after the United States, with around 2.3 crore Covid-19 cases, and currently recording over 300,000 new cases and 4,000 deaths every day.
(Sources: TimesNowNews)
