1. WARNINGS BY EXPERTS WENT UNHEEDED
GENOME SEQUENCING WAS NOT PRIORITISED EVEN AFTER CONCERNS WERE ARTICULATED ABOUT MUTANTS CAUSING A SECOND WAVE
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.
It was only on December 21, after the UK variant was recorded in England, that the Union ministry of health and family welfare (MoHFW) formed the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) to do so. A group of 10 labs was granted funding and came under the purview of the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), which reports to the MoHFW. INSACOG’s job was to track Covid variants in the country, most specifically if any of the variants causing concern in the UK, Brazil and South Africa had reached India and also track the progress of the Indian variant, B.1.617, which had been detected in October 2020 by the CCMB.
INSACOG faced big hurdles from the start. The first major problem was a May 2020 Union finance ministry order banning the import of goods valued under Rs 200 crore. Several reagents and plastics used by Indian labs come from foreign manufacturers and have no Indian substitutes. To import any of these, a lab would have to prove to officials through a market assessment that no Indian alternative exists. The reagent restriction was lifted only in January this year. The second problem was funds. INSACOG was initially allocated Rs 115 crore for a sixmonth period, which was to come through the department of biotechnology. But the first tranche of funds was released only on March 31, 2021, and the allocation itself was reduced to Rs 80 crore. Till then, the labs had to spend their own resources for sequencing.
The third, and the biggest, problem was getting hold of samples from the states to enable the labs to track the variants. Barring Kerala, most states were lackadaisical in their approach. Covid-19 testing labs in states must preserve positive samples from patients and it is the responsibility of state governments to transport a set number of these samples to the 10 INSACOG labs every week. The problem, an official at one of the labs revealed, was that most states had not appointed nodal officers to ensure collection and transport of the samples to the labs. Some states didn’t have cold storages to preserve the samples before and during transportation. As a result, INSACOG fell far short of its objective of sequencing around 80,000 samples by February 2021—it managed to do only 3,500.
This was one reason why it was only in March that INSACOG could