The latest Covid surge is not alarming as the lethality of the virus has been reduced significantly, a top health ministry source said on Wednesday.
The official explained that India’s apex medical research agency, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), has isolated the XBB.1.16 omicron subvariant and assessed the vaccine efficiency.
“The XBB subvariant of Covid has been isolated, assessment of vaccine efficiency has been done. This variant is not fatal,” said the official.
He tried explaining with an instance that if 1,000 people in India are catching the infection, it does not even convert to one death. “The lethality of the virus has been reduced significantly. It’s not even half of what it was earlier.”
However, the official said that the cases will continue to rise for the next few days. “We can expect a rise in cases for the next eight to ten days. Twenty days have already passed since we started registering an upward trend.”
He added that historically we have seen that generally cases start falling after a month or so once they hit the peak.
However, the official said that even though the cases of Covid are rising, the current surge cannot be called a “wave”.
The central government will not buy boosters but has asked state governments to buy their own stocks as per the requirement considering that the demand for boosters has been very dull in the past few months.
India on Wednesday witnessed a significant rise in the daily Covid-19 cases as compared to the day before, with 7,830 new infections — taking the total tally to 4,47,76,002. The cases in one day jumped by 40 per cent.
On Tuesday, a total of 5,676 cases were reported. According to the health ministry data, active infections stand at 40,215.
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