Fears of fresh wave as India's Covid-19 infections rise again

Six Indian states have seen a fresh surge of Covid-19 cases and have been asked to regularly monitor mutant strains through testing and genome sequencing and refocus on surveillance and containment measures, a federal Health Ministry bulletin said Sunday.

The latest spike in cases has raised concern that new mutant variations of the virus may lead to a fresh wave of the pandemic in the country which has seen a substantial slowdown of the spread of the virus between September and January.

The largest spike in cases have been reported in Kerala and Maharashtra over the past four weeks, followed by Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh – both of which share borders with Maharashtra – as well as Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir.

Around 77 per cent of all new cases reported in the past 24 hours were in Maharashtra and Kerala, the Health Ministry said.

 “At least 240 new strains of the virus had surfaced in Maharashtra and its capital Mumbai and were behind the new surge of infections in the state,” NDTV news channel quoted the state’s Covid-19 task force member Shashank Joshi as saying.

At least a dozen samples tested in a state-run laboratory in Maharashtra had shown that the new variations were not the ones found in Britain, South Africa or Brazil, NDTV reported. Further testing was being done to see if they were local variants.

India with a population of 1.3 billion has one of the largest Covid-19 caseloads in the world just short of 11 million.

Daily infections had steadily declined between a peak of about 80,000-90,000 daily in mid-September to around 11,000-12,000 in mid-January.