Covid-19 - Devastating Second Wave in India - Updates and Discussion

[Dalit]

RSS devotees need to be ashamed. They have put the entire world at risk.

 

[WinterFangs]

Not going to happen, priti patel and the tories have no backbones.

 

[Dalit]

Not going to happen, priti patel and the tories have no backbones.

Priti is an RSS devotee. It will be a lot of fun to see how that bleach head Boris now reacts to Indian variant infections in the UK.

 

[FuturePAF]

Can you shorten this time scale!!!

Modi’s incompetence is doing just that, and the stories are heartbreaking. With all due respect, not a laughing matter.

 

[crankthatskunk]

Modi’s incompetence is doing just that, and the stories are heartbreaking. With all due respect, not a laughing matter.

Off course it is not, when human suffering is involved.
With same token, have you seen the behaviour of the Indians on this forum!!
They still think Pakistan and Pakistanis are very low compare to them. For such people, comments are made.

 

[casual]

it's almost like India is doing everything possible to enable spread of the virus. triple mutant incoming.

 

[Ali_Baba]

This is "Shining India" .... the problem India has now is that if they do a shutdown - even if isolated to certain areas, people will leave and go to their home towns and carry this variant to the rural areas. If they dont do anything, this thing will burn like fire through their population. Modi was clumsy in his approach, as he is with everything, and it will now hurt.

Honetly, - how silly was it to allow that "festival" to go ahead?!

I hope Pakistan has banned all travel between Pakistan and India and i also hope that the leadership of Pakistan are honest with the people of Pakistan to restrict their activities for Eid Celebrations!!!!

The images of Mecca with limited numbers of people under Covid social distancing should send the right messages to all of the muslims in the world. This is not over, please social distance and restrict contacts with others and wear masks.

 

[Path-Finder]

fake newj.

 

[Capt. Karnage]

As India’s daily tally of Covid-19 infections surge by a record 200,000-plus cases for three consecutive days, public health experts worry that a new — possibly more virulent — coronavirus variant could be racing through the crowded nation of more than 1.3 billion people.

The new variant, which has a so-called double mutation, is thought to be fueling India’s deadlier new wave of infections that has made it the world’s second worst-hit country, surpassing Brazil, and has already begun to overwhelm its hospitals and crematoriums. The Asian nation has reported more than 14.5 million Covid cases so far and more than 175,600 fatalities.

“This is a variant of interest we are following," Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead officer on Covid, told reporters Friday. “Having two of these mutations, which have been seen in other variants around the world, are concerning," she said, adding that there was a similarity with mutations that increase transmission as well as reduce neutralization, possibly stunting the ability of vaccines to curb them.

The new strain underscores the insidious nature of viruses and threatens to thwart containment efforts in India, despite stringent measures such as the world’s largest lockdown last year. An exploding outbreak in India risks undoing a hard-won victory over the pathogen for others too, especially as this strain has now jumped to at least 10 other countries.

Here’s what we know so far:

How did the “double mutation" variant emerge?

The new variant, called B.1.617, was initially detected in India with two mutations -- the E484Q and L452R. It was first reported late last year by a scientist in India and more details were presented before the WHO on Monday, according to Van Kerkhove.

Viruses mutate all the time, as part of evolutionary biology. Some mutations weaken the virus while others may make it stronger, enabling it to proliferate faster or cause more infections.

India’s health ministry first acknowledged the presence of such a “double mutant" at the end of March, but has downplayed it since. While it’s a variant of interest, it “has not been stamped as a ‘variant of concern’ so as to say that it is more lethal or more infectious," Aparna Mukherjee, a scientist at the Indian Council of Medical Research, which works under the nation’s health ministry, told Bloomberg TV on Friday.

The double mutation has been found in several countries like Australia, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Namibia, New Zealand, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S., according to an April 16 statement from the Indian government. “Higher transmissibility of this variant is not established as yet," it said.

Is it causing the record surge in infections in India?

Genome sequencing indicates the variant as a possible culprit although the Indian government hasn’t confirmed it.

The average prevalence of the variant surged to as high as 52% of samples sequenced in April from almost nothing in January, according to website tracker outbreak.info, which uses data from global repository GISAID.

In some districts in Maharashtra state -- home to the nation’s financial hub Mumbai and epicenter of the current wave that’s currently under lockdown-like rules -- the prevalence of this variant was more than 60%, according to Anurag Agrawal, director of the state-run Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s genomics institute that’s conducting sequencing. The B.1.617 was present in samples from about 10 Indian states and while the percentage may vary, it was expected to rise as “it has two critical mutations that make it more likely to transmit and escape prior immunity," Agrawal said.

Both mutations are known to decrease -- although not completely eliminate -- the binding of the antibodies created by infection and vaccination, according to Jesse Bloom, an associate professor for genome sciences and microbiology at the University of Washington.

“Mutations at sites E484 and L452 have been observed separately, but this is the first major viral lineage that combines the two," said Bloom. “I do think that this new viral variant is important to monitor."

“We did the math -- we do believe that a lot of the increase in the reproduction number can be explained by these mutations," Nithya Balasubramanian, the head of health care research at Bernstein India, told Bloomberg TV this week. “So, yes, the mutations are a big cause for worry."

After being complacent in mapping virus genomes in recent months -- India did sequencing for less than 1% positive samples as of last month -- the country is now scrambling to cover lost ground. “We are attempting to do at least 5% of whatever samples are there," said ICMR’s Mukherjee.

“It looks like that it is spreading faster than pre-existing variants," said Rakesh Mishra, the Hyderabad-based director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology -- another Indian lab doing genome sequencing of Covid samples. “Sooner or later, it will become prevalent in the whole country, given the way it is spreading."

Has it been found outside India?

This variant has been detected in at least 10 other countries, including the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, according to the situation report on outbreak.info.

As of April 16, 408 sequences in the B.1.617 lineage have been detected of which 265 were found in India, the report shows. A surveillance report by the U.K. government said it has found 77 cases in England and Scotland so far, designating it as a “Variant Under Investigation."

New Zealand has temporarily suspended arrivals of its citizens and residents from India due to the spike in the number returning with Covid. Brazil was also shunned as a Covid superspreader by its neighbors who were nervous about the virus strain next door.

India’s second wave -- given its size and rapid pace -- will worry other nations that have just about managed their own outbreaks after weeks of economy-devastating lockdowns.

Is it deadlier than other variants out there?

Researchers are still trying to figure that out. The features of the double mutant variant are under investigation, but the L452R mutation is well characterized in U.S studies, according to Agrawal. It increases viral transmission by around 20% and reduces antibody efficacy by more than 50%, he said.

Globally, three worrisome variants that have so far emerged in the U.K., South Africa and Brazil have caused particular concern. Studies suggest they are more contagious, and some evidence points to one of them being more deadly while another drives reinfections.

This double mutant strain, first found in India, has begun troubling virologists everywhere.

“The B.1.617 variant has all the hallmarks of a very dangerous virus," William A. Haseltine, a former professor at Harvard Medical School wrote in Forbes on April 12. “We must do all that is possible to identify its spread and to contain it."

Do vaccines work against it?

It’s hard to know for sure without adequate data and research. India is testing whether the new variants, including the B.1.617, are capable of “immune escape or not," according to ICMR’s Mukherjee.

Immune escape refers to a pathogen’s ability to evade human bodies’ immunity response. This means antibodies created after vaccination or prior infection may not protect a person from getting infected. If the new India variant shows “immune escape" behavior, this would have deep ramifications for India’s vaccination program, which has picked up after a sluggish start and administered almost 120 million doses so far.

India has currently authorized three vaccines. Two of them are already in use while the third, Russia’s Sputnik V, was approved this week. India also fast-tracked approval for foreign vaccines this week. All of these efforts risk being jeopardized if the shots turn out to be less effective against this double mutation variant.

“It is one of the ones that’s on our radar, and in doing so, it means it’s on the radar of people around the world," said Van Kerkhove.

India has a double mutant coronavirus variant. Should we worry?

The new variant, which has a so-called double mutation, is thought to be fueling India’s deadlier new wave of infections that has made it the world’s second worst-hit country, surpassing Brazil, and has already begun to overwhelm its hospitals and crematoriums

www.livemint.com

Not only India is in big trouble, but the whole world is. RSS pandits have intentionally spread the corona virus by amassing during holi festival.

@Salmanov Your Indian friends are in trouble. Anything to say?

India has only one virus called media which is creating hysteria about this fake pandemic. Covid is nothing but a seasonal flu which cures on its own. Problems start when you go to hospitals for it. No one has died of covid outside hospitals.

 

[Dalit]

Country reports over 2.7L cases and 1,600 deaths during last 24 hrs; India is better placed when it comes to daily death ratio

Out of every third Covid-19 infection globally on daily basis, one is now from India. The grim statistic underlines the fact that India’s situation is far worse than the rest of the world, which is now recovering from the onset of the deadly second wave. The country reported 2,74,944 cases and 1,620 deaths during the last 24 hours by Sunday midnight.

On Saturday, globally a total of 7.84 lakh new infections were reported, out of which India alone contributed 2.60 lakh cases. The US and Brazil, the two others worst-affected countries, added 63,000 and 65,000 fresh cases respectively.

However, India is better placed when it came to the daily death count. Out of a total of 11,596 deaths reported globally on Saturday, India added only 1,495. Brazil is seeing the worst death count. The country reported 2,865 deaths even as its total fresh cases were nearly four times less than India. On the other hand, the US recorded 738 deaths on Saturday.

India’s daily count continued to be led by Maharashtra which reported 68,631 cases and 503 deaths on Sunday, followed by Uttar Pradesh which reported 30,5666 new cases and 127 deaths.

National Capital Delhi reported 25,462 new cases, Karnataka 19,067, Chhattisgarh 12,345, Kerala 18,257 cases, Tamil Nadu 10,527, Rajasthan 10,514, Gujarat 10,340 cases. Reports from Uttar Pradesh said a life is lost to Covid every 11 minutes as 129 people died due to corona infection despite the imposition of night curfew and weekend lockdown. State additional Chief Secretary Health Amit Mohan Prasad said here on Sunday there are 1,91,457 active cases in the State .

Lucknow recorded the highest number of 5,551 new infections in the State. In the last 24 hours, 22 people have died in Lucknow while there are 47,700 active cases. A total of 2,011, new infections were reported in Varanasi. Ten people have died here in the last 24 hours.

Kanpur overtook Prayagraj on Sunday. Here 1,839 new infected have been found while eight people have died.

The graph of death is increasing in Prayagraj too. Here 15 people have died in the last 24 hours and 1,711 new cases have been found.

New infections are increasing unexpectedly in Ghazipur and Jhansi. A total of 954 cases have been reported in Jhansi, 858 in Bareilly and 814 in Ghazipur, 782 in Meerut, 781 in Gorakhpur, 700 in Gautam Budh Nagar, 590 in Lakhimpur Kheri, 566 in Unnao, 511 in Jaunpur, 486 in Sultanpur and 440 in Agra.

Prasad said in view of the fast-growing infection in the State, instructions have been given to construct a 200 bedded Covid hospitals in the big cities as well as in small districts.

The situation in Kerala has also become alarming as the Department of Health on Sunday diagnosed 18, 257 persons with Covid-19. The State has 1.23 million Covid-19 patients as of Sunday evening, according to a press release issued by the Health Department of Kerala. The day also saw 25 persons succumbing to the pandemic taking the death toll to date to 4,929.

Details released by the State administration belied the claims made by Chief Minister and Health Minister that everything was under control in Kerala. “Today’s data proves that the Government has lost control and direction of the preventive mechanism in the State. Since day one the Kerala Government failed to convince the people to regulate and alter the lifestyle to check the spread of the pandemic. Wearing masks and maintaining social distance alone would not prevent Covid 19,” said Dr B Rajeev, a physician specializing in the Indian System of Medicine to control the pandemic.

A Government physician told The Pioneer that the health department was manipulating figures to suit the convenience of the political masters. “Though the release says Ernakulam district has 2,835 patients as on Sunday evening, the district had registered more than 3,000 cases by 11 am itself,” said the doctor.

Both Dr. Rajeev and the Government physicians were more bothered about the post-Covid syndrome which is expected to hit the people in the 15 to 45 age group. “They are the ones that sustain the nation. If they suffer any physiological changes because of Covid-29, we are in for major trouble, economically and socially,” said both the doctors.

Meanwhile, Tamil Nadu too continued to test increased cases on Sunday. The State diagnosed 10,723 new cases on Sunday while 42 fatalities were registered in the State. The administration tightened the restrictions and regulations to take Covid-19 head-on. A release by the Government of Tamil Nadu said the entire State would be put under curfew from 10 pm to 4 am. No vehicles will be allowed during the curfew hours.

While Sundays would see total lockdown, tourism operations have been suspended fully in hill stations like Nilgiris, Kodaikkanal and Yercaud. Only on-line classes are allowed in colleges and universities.

While the Government postponed the 12th Board Examination, parks, beaches, museums will remain out of bound for all till further orders.

World’s 33% daily Covid cases from India

Country reports over 2.7L cases and 1,600 deaths during last 24 hrs; India is better placed when it comes to daily death ratio Out of every third Covid-19 infection globally on daily basis, one is now from India. The grim statistic underlines the fact that India’s situation is far worse than the

www.dailypioneer.com

 

[UKBengali]

Pakistan has stabilised its new cases at 2.5 per 100,000 population per day.

BD peaked at 4 new cases per 100,000 population per day and is now done to 3 new cases per 100,000 population per day.

India is currently at 16 new cases per 100,000 population per day and and is still on a fast upward trajectory.

This country is now a Covid-19 disaster zone, heading to be bigger even than Brazil and we may potentially even see daily deaths surpass 5,000 if the upward rise does not stabilise within the next 1-2 weeks.

 

[Hakikat ve Hikmet]

As per the US experts, for every 1 case detected in India there're 30 remaining undetected....

It'a a "Biblical" level catastrophe in the making....

*They demolished a mosque built by Babur, who used to be a hard drinker before the conquest of Hindustan. They now want to demolish a mosque built by Alamgir Aurangzeb, who was known as Zinde Pir

 

[vi-va]

Seems when new cases going rocket high, no lock down any more.
What's the national lock down in 2020 in India all about?

 

[Dalit]

In early March, India's health minister Harsh Vardhan declared the country was "in the endgame" of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mr Vardhan also lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership as an "example to the world in international co-operation". From January onwards, India had begun shipping doses to foreign countries as part of its much-vaunted "vaccine diplomacy".

Mr Vardhan's unbridled optimism was based on a sharp drop in reported infections. Since a peak of more than 93,000 cases per day on average in mid-September, infections had steadily declined. By mid-February, India was counting an average of 11,000 cases a day. The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths from the disease had slid to below 100.

The euphoria at beating the virus had been building since late last year. Politicians, policy makers and parts of the media believed that India was truly out of the woods. In December, central bank officials announced that India was "bending the Covid infection curve". There was evidence, they said, in poetic terms, that the economy was "breaking out amidst winter's lengthening shadows towards a place in sunlight". Mr Modi was called a "vaccine guru".

At the end of February, India's election authorities announced key elections in five states where 186 million people were eligible to vote for 824 seats. Beginning 27 March, the polls would stretch over a month, and in the case of the state of West Bengal, be held in eight phases. Campaigning had begun in full swing, with no safety protocols and social distancing. In mid-March, the cricket board allowed more than 130,000 fans, mostly unmasked, to watch two international cricket games between India and England at the Narendra Modi stadium in Gujarat.

In less than a month, things began to unravel. India was in the grips of a devastating second wave of the virus and cities were facing fresh lockdowns. By mid-April, the country was averaging more than 100,000 cases a day. On Sunday, India recorded more than 275,000 cases and over 1,600 deaths, both new single-day records. If the runway infection was not checked, India could be recording more than 2,300 deaths every day by first week of June, according to report by The Lancet Covid-19 Commission.

India is in now in the grips of a public health emergency. Social media feeds are full with videos of Covid funerals at crowded cemeteries, wailing relatives of the dead outside hospitals, long queues of ambulances carrying gasping patients, mortuaries overflowing with the dead, and patients, sometimes two to a bed, in corridors and lobbies of hospitals. There are frantic calls for help for beds, medicines, oxygen, essential drugs and tests. Drugs are being sold on the black market, and test results are taking days. "They didn't tell me for three hours that my child is dead," a dazed mother says in one video, sitting outside an ICU. Wails of another person outside the intensive care punctuate the silences.

Even India's mammoth vaccination effort was now struggling. In the beginning, the rollout had been embroiled in a controversy over the efficacy over a home-grown candidate. Even as the country ramped up the drive and administered more than 100 million doses by last week, vaccine shortages were being reported. Serum Institute of India, the country's - and the world's - biggest vaccine maker said it would not be able to ramp up supplies before June because it didn't have enough money to expand capacity. India placed a temporary hold on all exports of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, because the doses were needed urgently at home, and allowed imports of foreign vaccines. Even oxygen was likely to be imported now to meet the surge in demand.

Meanwhile, almost in a parallel universe, away from the death and despair, the world's richest cricket tournament was being played behind closed doors every evening, and tens of thousands of people were following their leaders to election rallies and attending the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela. "It is beyond surreal, what is happening," Shiv Visvanathan, a sociology professor, told me.

Experts believe the government appears to have completely dropped the ball on the second wave of infections that was about to hit India.

In mid-February, Tabassum Barnagarwala, a journalist with the Indian Express newspaper, flagged a seven-fold rise in new cases in parts of Maharashtra and reported that samples from the infected had been sent for genome sequencing to look for imported variants.

By the end of the month, the BBC reported the surge and asked whether India was facing a new Covid wave. "We really don't know what the cause of the surge is. What is worrying is that entire families are getting infected. This is a completely new trend," Dr Shyamsunder Nikam, civil surgeon of an affected district in Maharashtra, said at the time.

Experts now say that crowing about India's exceptionalism in "beating" the epidemic - younger population, native immunity, a largely rural population - and declaring victory on the virus turned out to be cruelly premature. "As is typical in India, official arrogance, hyper-nationalism, populism and an ample dose of bureaucratic incompetence have combined to create a crisis," said Mihir Sharma, a columnist for Bloomberg.

India's second wave was fuelled by people letting their guard down, attending weddings and social gatherings, and by mixed messaging from the government, allowing political rallies and religious gatherings. With infections declining, fewer people were taking the jabs, slowing down the vaccination drive, which had aimed to inoculate 250 million people by the end of July. In mid-February, Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan, tweeted that India needed to "accelerate the vaccination drive while the case counts are low". Nobody quite took notice.

"There was a feeling of triumphalism," said P Srinath Reddy, the president of the Public Health Foundation of India. "Some felt we had achieved herd immunity. Everyone wanted to get back to work. This narrative fell on many receptive ears, and the few voices of caution were not heeded to," he said.

A second wave may have been inevitable, but India could have "postponed or delayed it and lessened its impact," said Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology. Like many other countries, India should have begun careful genomic surveillance in January to detect variants, Mr Menon said. Some of these variants could be driving the surge. "We learnt of new variants in February from reports from Maharashtra. This was initially denied by authorities," Mr Menon added. "This was a significant turning point."

What are the lessons of this public health crisis? For one, India should learn not to declare victory over the virus prematurely, and it should put a lid on triumphalism. People should also learn to adapt to short, local lockdowns in the event of the inevitable future spikes of infection. Most epidemiologists predict more waves, given that India is evidently still far away from reaching herd immunity and its vaccination rate remains slow.

"We cant freeze human life," Professor Reddy said. "If we can't physically distance in the crowded cities, we can at least make sure everyone wears a proper mask. And wear it properly. That's not a big ask."

Covid-19: How India failed to prevent a deadly second wave

India's government and parts of the media ignored warnings about a rising wave of cases, experts say.

www.bbc.com

 

[HostileInsurgent]

Mutations are the reason of such a sudden spike considering our vaccination program is running very well. Plus of course election rallies then religious gatherings of Kumbh and Ramzan etc.