Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya has decided to hold a high-level review meeting on Friday with the core team of experts over increasing Covid-19 infections in the country.
As on date, 10 States — Maharashtra, Kerala, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, West Bengal and Gujarat — have over 1,000 active cases.
The core team of experts will include AIIMS director Dr Randip Guleria, ICMR Director General Dr Balram Bhargava and NCDC director Sujeet Singh.
Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan, Secretary of Department of Biotechnology Rajesh S Gokhale, Secretary in the Department of Pharmaceuticals S Aparna, among others, will also attend the meeting.
In a review meeting of INSACOG held last week, states/UTs were asked to submit a "larger number" of samples for whole genome sequencing from districts and areas which had seen a surge in COVID-19 cases over a period of seven days.
In the meantime, Dr Rajesh Karyekarte of B J Medical College in his study conducted on 116 patients who were infected with BA.2.38, an offspring of Omicron's sub-variant BA.2, said that, “We have done the genome sequencing of some samples from April to June and sent the report to the Government. During the analysis, we found that BA.2 is common, but its offspring BA.2.38 is also prevalent and is neck to neck with BA.2.”
Talking to a news agency, he said that the report was submitted to the government and Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (Insacog) and it was informed in a meeting that the occurrence of BA.2.38 is the same as BA.2.
"We were then told to conduct a fast study of BA.2.38 to ascertain its severity. We immediately carried out the study involving 116 patients (with BA.2.38), who were at home and had already recovered," Dr Karyekarte said. Majority of these patients had experienced mild symptoms, while only one person required oxygen support and one was brought dead, he said.
The overall severity of the illness was mild and it shows that vaccination helped, he said, adding that only one of the patients had not been vaccinated against Covid-19.