INDIA COVID-19 CASES CROSS 54 LAKH MARK

As overall cases of Coronavirus crossed 54 lakh in India with 92,605 fresh cases in last 24 hours, Minister of state for health Ashwini Kumar Choubey told Rajya Sabha on Sunday that the overall number of cases and deaths per million population due to

Covid-19 in the country is much lower compared to similarly affected countries. On Sunday, 1,133 fresh deaths were recorded taking overall fatalities to 86,752.

Choubey said trying to develop herd immunity against

Covid-19 in the absence of established pharmaceutical interventions may have disastrous consequences in terms of morbidity and mortality. In a written reply in Rajya Sabha, he said in the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, countries that thought of developing herd immunity through a natural process of allowing the disease transmission had very high morbidity and mortality and therefore, “had to abandon the strategy”.

The minister was responding to a question on whether state governments are following herd immunity measures to fight the Covid-19 pandemic in the country.

Union health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan said “no significant or drastic mutations” have been found in strains of

SARS-CoV-2 in India till now and added that ICMR has been conducting large-scale sequencing of nationally representative strains of SARS

CoV-2 virus collected over the past several months over different time-points and detailed results on mutations and evolution of the virus will be available in early October.