2:08 PM
As more infectious variants of Covid hits hard with a spike, increasing number of deaths in Japan is handicapping the hospital resources. As 96% of the critical beds are occupied the hospitals are at the verge of collapse. Yasutoshi Kido, a professor at Osaka City University’s Graduate school of medicine on Monday said, “Compared to the number of infections, the number of beds for severe cases is very limited in Japan.”
Seychelles, which had raced up to vaccinate its population has vaccinated more of its population against Covid-19 than any other country, saw active cases more than double in the week of May. Seychelles used Sinopharm shots to 57% to those who were vaccinated and the rest with Covishield. This raising concerns that vaccination is not helping turns the tide in some places. The health ministry of Archipelago on Monday announced that the situation is worsening with cases rising more than double since last week.
The paper, in pre-print stage, holds the B.1.617’s modest ability to dodge antibodies responsible for its high infectivity and transmissibility that fuelled the second wave in India.
“The data go some way in explaining the dominance of this variant in a partially immune population, but highlights that vaccination is still protective for the majority of people,” said Gupta Lab, the Twitter handle of Ravi Gupta from the University of Cambridge’s department of medicine and author of the new study.
Dr Anurag Agrawal, director of the Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology and a co-author of the paper, told TOI the most important point is that “vaccines protect against B.1.617”. “There is an immune escape, but not of a high degree,” he added. Late on Monday, another scientist, Vinod Scaria, from the institute tweeted B.1.617 is unlikely to be a major immune escape variant.
India s covid collapse, part 1: How Modi government s complacency in keeping track of new mutants triggered second wave Sonali Acharjee
Forewarned is forearmed. This maxim holds good for all nations trying to combat the waves of Covid-19 that threaten the world today. Yet the Narendra Modi government, which had acted with alacrity during the first wave, was surprisingly complacent, not keeping track of mutations of the virus that could trigger a second wave of infections as it did in the US and the UK and is now doing in India. When the first wave raged, barring two institutes, the Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, there was no coordinated national effort to sequence Covid samples to detect the most dominant variants and to ascertain if any threatening mutations had occurred.
ISSUE DATE: May 17, 2021
UPDATED: May 12, 2021 09:20 IST
A health worker at the genome sequencing laboratory set up at Delhi’s IGI airport; (ANI)
Forewarned is forearmed. This maxim holds good for all nations trying to combat the waves of Covid-19 that threaten the world today. Yet the Narendra Modi government, which had acted with alacrity during the first wave, was surprisingly complacent, not keeping track of mutations of the virus that could trigger a second wave of infections as it did in the US and the UK and is now doing in India. When the first wave raged, barring two institutes, the Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, there was no coordinated national effort to sequence Covid samples to detect the most dominant variants and to ascertain if any threatening mutations had occurred.
ISSUE DATE: May 17, 2021
UPDATED: May 7, 2021 23:36 IST
Staff at the Ghazipur crematorium in Delhi cart in fresh logs as
funeral pyres burn all around them (Rajk Raj/ Getty Images)
The second wave of Covid-19 is still cresting but by now we have all been touched by its terrors, and all too many of us by its sorrows and the dismal realisation that we are in the midst of a recurring nightmare, a tragedy foretold. Here, we expose the sorry tale of neglect, apathy and failure of our political leadership. The institutional collapse and bureaucratic cowardice that facilitated super-spreader religious festivals and the political carnival of an eight-phase election campaign even as the second wave of a pandemic was breaking. The narcissism that enabled our leadership to ignore the warnings of expert groups. Their inability to form bipartisan alliances between the Centre and the states in the middle of a national calamity. Now that some of the loudest voices in the land have gone quiet, t