A policeman asks people to wear protective face masks, in Kolkata. (PTI)
KOLKATA: The Covid-19 virus that is doing the rounds in Bengal is increasingly being found 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.
The “Bengal strain”, as a scientist has dubbed it, might be more infective, and — something that experts find particularly worrying — 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. There has, however, been no research yet to either corroborate or dismiss the fears.