Variant? “The current 🇮🇳 wave of #COVID19 has a different clinical behavior. It’s affecting young adults. It’s affecting families. It’s a new thing altogether. Two-month-old babies are getting infected.” Also many reports of reinfections/breakthroughs.🧵
nytimes.com/2021/04/28/wor…
nytimes.com/2021/04/28/wor…
2) “As supplies run dangerously low and hospitals forced to turn away sick, scientists are trying to determine what role variants might be playing. They are working with precious little data. India, like many other countries, has not built up a robust system to track viruses.”
3) “India’s worries have focused on a homegrown variant called B.1.617. The public, the popular press and many doctors have concluded that it is responsible for the severity of the second wave. “
4) “Researchers outside of India say the limited data so far suggests instead that a better-known variant called B.1.1.7 may be a more considerable factor. That variant walloped Britain late last year, hit much of Europe and is now the most common source of new infection in US”
5) “While it’s almost certainly true B.1.617 is playing a role, it’s unclear how much it’s contributing directly to the surge and how that compares to other circulating variants, especially B.1.1.7,” said Kristian Andersen @K_G_Andersen, virologist at Scripps Research Institute.
6) “Preliminary evidence suggests that the variant is still responsive to vaccines, although slightly less so. India relies heavily on Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine (aka Covishield), which clinical trials show is less powerful than the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna…
7) “…and could perhaps be more easily thwarted by mutations.
For now the vaccines remain effective, but there is a trend toward less effectiveness,” said Dr. Céline Gounder @celinegounder, an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York.
For now the vaccines remain effective, but there is a trend toward less effectiveness,” said Dr. Céline Gounder @celinegounder, an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York.
8) “In India, a number of doctors point to anecdotal evidence that people who have been fully vaccinated are getting sick. Those doctors also say they’re seeing children with serious symptoms, such as severe diarrhea, acidosis, falling blood pressure—even among healthy patients.”
9) “Researchers say other factors could lead to more infections among young people, such as India’s schools, which had started reopening in recent months after the country’s first wave.”
10) ““There are variants that are more transmissible than what we all coped with a year ago,” Dr. Barrett said of the many variants in India. “Things can change really quickly, so if a country doesn’t react quickly enough, things can go from bad to very bad very quickly.”
11) “Scientists say that different variants seem to dominate specific parts of India. For instance, the B.1.617 variant has been detected in a large number of samples from the central state of Maharashtra.
12) “By contrast, the B.1.1.7 variant is rising quickly in New Delhi, said Dr. Sujeet Singh, director of India’s National CDC. It was prevalent in half of samples evaluated at end of March, up from 28% just two weeks before. The B.1.617 variant is also circulating in New Delhi”
13) “But ultimately, the data from India is too thin to parse the distribution of variants around the country. Despite the huge number of new infections, India is performing very little genomic sequencing.” ⚠️
14) “In December, the government tapped a group of 10 laboratories and set an ambitious target to sequence 5 percent of samples across the country every month. But so far, less than 1 percent of samples collected has been sequenced.”
15) A report in The Wire, an Indian online publication, pointed to logistical challenges, bureaucratic red tape and the lack of funding as some of the reasons. science.thewire.in/health/insacog…
16) “Officials in India are trying to track how many fully vaccinated people have fallen ill, a measure called the breakthrough infection rate. That could suggest how virulent any variant in India might be.”
17) “At Sir Ganga Ram hospital, the 37 doctors who became infected after immunization had received their first dose between late January to early February and then their second dose four to six weeks after that. The hospital employs about 500 doctors.”
18) “So far, data from the Indian Council of Medical Research up to April 21 shows an extremely low breakthrough infection rate, though perhaps not as low as that of US. The data shows 0.02 to 0.04% of vaccinated people falling ill. The rate in US (different vaccines) is 0.008%.”
20) To be clear—there has been much debate in the role of the new variants for a month. Early on, opinions widely differed based on who was asked. Variants are likely a part of the new surge for sure, but just not sure how much versus large religious and political gatherings.
https://twitter.com/VishnuNDTV/status/1377144249930551298
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