The prevalence of Omicron sub-lineage BA.2 is gradually increasing in India, but there are indications of a plateau in the number of cases, with just the top 10 States contributing to 77 per cent of total active cases in the country.
Sujeet Kumar Singh, Director, National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), said at a media briefing here that “Omicron sub-variant BA.2 is more prevalent in comparison to the BA.1 variant in India now. However, the BA.3 sub-variant has not been detected in India yet.”
“The percentage of the highly transmissible Omicron variant increased rapidly in December and January and the prevalence of the Omicron subvariant called BA.2 is increasing in our community,” the NCDC director said.
“Earlier, the BA.1 variant was dominant among the samples collected from the travellers. Now in community settings, we have found that the BA.2 sub-variant is gradually increasing,” he said.
Talking about increasing cases of Omicron, Singh said that out of the total genome sequencing reports received so far, increasing cases of Omicron have been found in the month of January.
Of the total reports received, 1,292 Omicron cases were found in December last year, whereas the number of Delta cases was over 17,000, he said.
In January so far, 9,672 Omicron cases have been found against 4,779 Delta cases, which includes 3,201 AYC variants and 1,578 Delta variants, Singh said. Mainly three States — Maharashtra, Odisha, and West Bengal — have reported the Delta variant on the basis of genome sequencing, said Singh, adding that it does not mean that only the Omicron variant is being reported everywhere.
Talking about Covid fatalities, he said that those unvaccinated and people with comorbidities are in the high-risk group. “Around 64 per cent of those who died in Delhi were from the unvaccinated group with a major comorbid population,” he added.
ICMR chief Balram Bhargava said that vaccines have remained beneficial for India. “Vaccine reduces deaths considerably in the vaccinated population compared to the unvaccinated individuals. Around 95 per cent of the adult population in the country have received the first vaccine dose, while 74 per cent have been fully vaccinated,” said Bhargava, as he urged the States lagging behind in vaccination to ramp up the drive.
Recently, the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) too had in its bulletin cautioned that Omicron is now in community transmission in India and has become dominant in multiple metros, where new cases have been rising exponentially. BA.2 lineage is in a substantial fraction in India and S gene dropout based screening is thus likely to give high false negatives.”
