Variant accelerating India’s COVID explosion – WHO top scientist

GENEVA (AFP) – A COVID-19 variant spreading in India is more contagious and may be dodging vaccine protections, contributing to the country’s explosive outbreak, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist said Saturday.

In an interview with AFP, Soumya Swaminathan warned that “the epidemiological features that we see in India today do indicate that it’s an extremely rapidly spreading variant.”

India on Saturday for the first time registered more than 4,000 COVID-19 deaths in just 24 hours, and more than 400,000 new infections.

New Delhi has struggled to contain the outbreak, which has overwhelmed its healthcare system, and many experts suspect the official death and case numbers are a gross underestimate.

Swaminathan, an Indian pediatrician and clinical scientist, said the B1617 variant of COVID-19, which was first detected in India last October, was clearly a contributing factor to the disaster unfolding in her homeland.

”There have been many accelerators that are fed into this,” the 62-year-old said, stressing that “a more rapidly spreading virus is one of them.”

The WHO recently listed B1617 – which counts several sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics – as a “variant of interest.”

But so far it has stopped short of adding it to its short list of “variant of concern” – a label indicating it is more dangerous than the original version of the virus by being more transmissible, deadly or able to get past vaccine protections.

Several national health authorities, including in the United States and Britain, have meanwhile said they consider B1617 a variant of concern, and Swaminathan said she expected the WHO to soon follow suit.

”B1617 is likely to be a variant of concern because it has some mutations which increase transmission, and which also potentially could make (it) resistant to antibodies that are generated by vaccination or by natural infection,” she said.

But she insisted that the variant alone could not be blamed for the dramatic surge in cases and deaths seen in India, lamenting that the country appeared to have let down its guard, with “huge social mixing and large gatherings.”

AFP A family member offers prayers during the cremation of his loved one who died of coronavirus, at a cremation ground in Allahabad on Saturday, as India recorded more than 4,000 coronavirus deaths in a day for the first time.