India is seeing more than 300,000 new COVID infections every day ― as with the chessboard formula, exponential growth could become a problem in the medium term, not just for the country itself, but for the world.
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It will provide the much-needed boost for COVID-19 vaccination programme in India, say researchers
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A paramedical staff preparing a dose of Covaxin vaccine before administering to a recipient, in Chennai on Monday.
| Photo Credit: K. Pichumani
It will provide the much-needed boost for COVID-19 vaccination programme in India, say researchers
A study has found that people who have been vaccinated with Covaxin have protection against the double mutant (B.1.617) variant first found in India. A preprint of the study carried out by ICMR and Bharat Biotech researchers has been posted in
biorXiv. Preprints are yet to be peer-reviewed and published in medical journals.
Covaxin can neutralise deadly 617 COVID variant
With the initial scepticism on its safety taken care of long back; a large part of the current resistance towards Covid vaccine has been due to doubts on its efficacy against different variants.
But if the latest, and more importantly, some credible information on Covid vaccine is anything to go by, then Covaxin can neutralise the dreaded B.1.617 variant.
Dr Anthony FauciReuters
Even though there is data to prove its efficacy against the deadly and highly infectious variant, Dr Anthony Fauci, the White House Chief Medical Adviser on Tuesday also said that they are collecting data on the same on a daily basis.
GENEVA: The World Health Organization said Tuesday that a variant of Covid-19 feared to be contributing to a surge in coronavirus cases in India has been found in over a dozen countries.
The UN health agency said the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19 first found in India had as of Tuesday been detected in over 1,200 sequences uploaded to the GISAID open-access database from at least 17 countries . Most sequences were uploaded from India, the United Kingdom, USA and Singapore, the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic.
The WHO recently listed B.1.617 which counts several sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics as a variant of interest .
record for new infections for a fifth day in a row at more than 350,000. For far too long, national and local authorities only half-heartedly fought the pandemic; regulations were quickly relaxed again even mass gatherings were permitted.
E484Q escape mutation
Scientists call a mutation that helps a virus slip past our immune system an escape mutation. According to Germany s Robert Koch Institute, these mutations generally lead to a reduced neutralizability by antibodies or T-cells. What matters is how strong that reduction is, however.
Researchers see no reason to believe that the variants will evade existing vaccines
Escape mutations can be dangerous for people who have been vaccinated and people who have recovered from COVID-19 infections, as well, because they are presumably not as able to defend against the variants, even if their bodies had developed immunity to the virus. It is not yet clear whether people who are inoculated but who contract the virus are infecti