Despite an uptick in new cases this week, the India Sars Cov2 Genome Consortium (INSACOG) has said there are no new concerning variants on the horizon in India.
The bulk of cases in India were the Delta variant and its related subvariants, mirroring what was happening in the rest of the world, the INSACOG said in its weekly bulletin, Thursday.
“Delta (B.1.617.2 and AY.x) continues to be the main VOC in India. No new VOI (Variants of Interest) or VOC (Variants of Concern) are noted and other VOC and VOI other than Delta are now negligible in sequencing data from India,” the bulletin noted. AY.x refers to a family of sublineages that can range from 1-25. They have a common set of core mutations but large variation in others.
According to the latest update from the World Health Organisation (WHO), Delta has outcompeted other variants in most countries and there was now “declining prevalence” of other variants among SARSCoV-2 sequences submitted to publicly available datasets or reported to WHO, the bulletin added.
As of Thursday, the INSACOG has analysed 92,800 genome sequence samples of those who have tested positive for the virus to determine what variants they harbour.
In October, following a spike in cases in Europe and the United Kingdom, Public Health England stated that AY4.2, a Delta variant sublineage, was responsible for a “slowly increasing” proportion of cases in the UK. It is also present in multiple other countries and is seen in travellers to the UK from a large number of countries. It is not clear where it originated or when. This lineage of the coronavirus has the mutations of Delta — the dominant global variant — and AY.4, a sublineage. The INSACOG, however, said the presence of the lineage was “very infrequent” in India.
New cases in November had dipped to nearly 10,000 a day, a low that hadn't been reported in India since February. However the last few days have seen cases average 11,000-13,000 everyday.
