NEW DELHI: As it struggles with a huge increase in coronavirus cases, India is tracking many other countries in the genomic sequencing needed to track emerging variants, creating a blind spot for local and global health officials.
The country has become the zero point of the pandemic and has surpassed 200,000 daily cases of infection this week, more than a peak before September. With a population of more than 1.3 billion people and shot infections, India is more likely to develop variants, which can take root and spread beyond its borders, public health experts said.
Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher focused on gene therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said that “where there are so many people affected, there are more chances” of new strains because there are more opportunities for the mute virus. . “The size of the infected population is what drives the emergence of new variants.”
Even with robust sequencing, countries can struggle to curb highly infectious variants with public health interventions, experts said. Nations that do not do too much genomic sequencing are blind spots where a strain can develop and spread to several countries before discovery. Scientists have not yet been able to definitively determine where the variants from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil originated.
Last month, India’s health ministry said its laboratories had detected all three variants in collected samples, along with a new “double mutant variant,” which according to public health experts may have originated. in India. The strain has two mutations, seen separately in other variants, but never together in one variant.