Geneva: The highly powerful double mutant variant from India has been traced to as many as 44 countries across the world, sparking fears of the possible consequence of the pandemic in the days to come.
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization said that the variant that is responsible for the quickening of India’s disastrous outbreak has been found in several countries now.
According to the UN health agency the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19, first identified 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”.
Other than India, Britain had reported the highest number of Covid-19 cases due to the variant.
Earlier this week, the WHO declared ‘B.1.617’ – that counts three sub-lineages with slightly different variations and characteristics – as ‘variant of concern’, and added to the list of three other variants – the British, Brazilian and South African.
The variants are seen as more serious than the original version of the virus because they are either being more transmissible, deadly or able to get past some vaccine protections.
As per WHO the preliminary evidence stated that the double mutant variant was more repellent to treatment “with the monoclonal antibody Bamlanivimab”, and showed “limited reduction in neutralisation by antibodies”.
WHO stated that the outbreak of the B.1.617 variant, accompanying other severely transmittable strains, is one of the several factors worsening India’s overwhelming surge in new cases and deaths.
Anurag Agrawal, director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, said on Tuesday, the ‘double mutant’ variant also leads to loss of neutralisation of antibodies but it’s modest, continuing that vaccines are effective against it.
According to news agency PTI, “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 they work a little bit less. They should prevent severe disease,” Agrawal said.
After the United States, India is the second-worst affected country with around 2.3 crore Covid-19 cases, and currently registering over 300,000 new cases and 4,000 deaths every day.
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