Guwahati: Chief scientist of the World Health Organization Soumya Swaminathan stated on Friday that there were over 300 sub-variants and the fact that XBB is a recombinant virus is cause for alarm in light of India’s announcement of a highly contagious new COVID-19 variant.
She also emphasized how immune evasive the new variant is.
“There are over 300 sub-varients of Omicron. I think the one that is concerning right now is XBB which is a recombinant virus. We had seen some recombinant viruses before. It is very immune evasive which means, it can overcome the antibodies. So slightly we may see another wave of infections in some countries because of XBB,” said Swaminathan.
She made her comments during a media briefing in Pune.
Stressing on the tracking of other derivatives of XBB, she noted, “We are also tracking derivatives of BA.5 and BA.1 which are also more transmissible and immune evasive. As the virus evolves, it is going to evolve more and become transmissible. As of now, there is no data from any country to suggest these new sub-varients are more clinically severe. While the virus is causing an increasing infection in some countries the severity seems to be similar.”
She also underlined the importance of monitoring and said, “We need to continue to monitor and track. We have seen that testing has gone down across countries, the genomic surveillance has also gone down over the last few months. We need to maintain at least a strategic sampling genomic surveillance so that we can keep tracking the variants as we have been doing and studying.”
The senior scientist emphasized the benefits and recommended for the use of the tools at hand.
“The good thing is that we have many tools and the most important thing is vaccines. For vaccine coverage, our goals are 100 per cent of people over the age of 60 and 100 per cent of healthcare and frontline workers. We have a goal of achieving 70 per cent of the country but subgroups are more important because they are the groups that are most likely to face morbidity and mortality,” she added.
In a bulletin from the state health department earlier on Tuesday, Maharashtra reported a 17.7% increase in coronavirus cases compared to the previous week.
New CoVid cases have been reported by the state, including those caused by the XBB sub-variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which has been found in Kerala and other regions of India.
In addition, Maharashtra has reported cases of Omicron sub-variants BA.2.3.20 and BQ.1, which were discovered for the first time in India on Monday in a patient’s sample from Pune.
A recent spike was observed in the fast-spreading variant XBB, which is a recombinant lineage between the Omicron sublineages BJ.1 and BA.2.75.
A high-level meeting about the appearance of new subvariants of Omicron between senior health officials and Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya resulted on Tuesday in the decision to continue mask use and COVID19-appropriate behaviour nationwide.
Additionally, expanding surveillance and genome sequencing have been suggested by the group of scientists, physicians,administrator and top administrators.
Additionally, the health professionals advocated mission mode acceleration of the COVID-19 cautionary dose to the eligible population.
According to official, VK Paul who is a member of the Niti Aayog, NK Arora, the chair of the COVID-19 working group representatives from NTAGI, NEGVAC and other senior health authorities were present.