COVID-19 on the rise again
Just as there was descending a sense of relief about the COVID-19 situation in the country, there is news that the infection is seeing a rise in five states—Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Karnataka and Kerala.
The Ministry of Health has flagged an upsurge in these five states, with the Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan asking them, in a letter, to keep up with the five-fold strategy of testing, tracking, treating, vaccinating and adopting Covid-appropriate behaviour. It asked the state authorities to send samples for genome sequencing to keep track of the variants responsible for this resurgence.
In the week ending June 3, Kerala recorded 6,556 new cases, Maharashtra recorded 4,883 new cases, Karnataka recorded 1,446 new cases, Tamil Nadu recorded 659 new cases and Telangana recorded 375 new cases. These five states represent 66.11 per cent of India’s new COID-19 cases.
These figures were all increases over the previous week’s, with Maharashtra’s figure alarmingly representing a doubling.
Some scientists suggest the latest surge represents breakthrough infection by a variant. A senior INSACOG (Indian National SARS-CoV-2 Genome Sequencing Consortium) scientist, however, said that nothing can be definitely said until analyses of genome sequencing data start coming in, which would be from the middle of next week.
