WHO on possibility of a new COVID-19 variant creating havoc in India

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned against jumping to conclusions about a new COVID-19 variant discovered in India. For the past one week now, India has been recording more than 300,000 new infections within 24 hours.

A spokeswoman of the global health body said it was not clear at this point to what extent the variant was responsible for the rapid increase in cases in India in recent months. She explained there are many factors such as festivals and other events with many participants that could have contributed to this acceleration of infections.

The British, South African and Brazilian variants of COVID-19 have all been classified by WHO as “variants of concern”. The newest variant was first detected in India on December 1, 2020. Now, the COVID-19 virus found in Bengal is said to be an indigenous triple-mutation (B.1.618), only the second one identified from India after the double mutant type (B.1.617) reported last month.

A scientist has described the “Bengal strain” as more infective and may be capable of escaping a person’s immune surveillance, even if that person was earlier exposed to a virus without this mutation, and even if vaccinated. However, there is no research or study to back this. Vinod Scaria, who researches genome mutations at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, posted on Twitter that the proportion of B.1.618 has been growing significantly in recent months in Bengal.

Experts are worried that the triple-mutated variant carries the E484K mutation – a characteristic of the South African and Brazilian variants. Sreedhar Chinnaswamy, NIBMG associate professor, said the E484K is known to be an immune escape variant, which means that previously raised antibodies against a virus without this mutation may be less effective in inhibiting the virus from infecting and causing disease in humans. “The Bengal strain (B.1.618) has four signature mutations that are distinct from the double-mutant circulating in some parts of India in recent months,” Chinnaswamy explained. “It contains the now fixed D614G mutation, that can be called the first variant to be identified from the virus that supposedly originated from Wuhan, China. It also has the E484K mutation.”

Also Read: Ride-sharing intensifies urban road congestion: Study

According to WHO, a variant is considered worrying if it spreads more easily, causes more serious cases of the disease, bypasses the immune system or reduces the effectiveness of known treatments. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Chief, on Monday said the number of reported infections per week has been increasing for nine weeks, while the number of reported deaths has been increasing for six weeks. “There were almost as many cases last week as in the first five months of the pandemic combined,” he said. “In India, in particular, the situation is more than heartbreaking.”