India recorded 8,582 new Covid cases, Saturday, taking the total tally of COVID-19 cases to 4,32,22,017. The active case count now stands at 44,513, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated Sunday.
The death count climbed to 5,24,761 with four fatalities, the data updated at 8 am stated. The four new fatalities include three from Kerala and one from Maharashtra.
Active cases comprise 0.10 per cent of the total infections, while the national COVID-19 recovery rate is pegged at 98.66 per cent, the ministry circular added. An increase of 4,143 cases has been recorded in the active COVID-19 caseload in a span of 24 hours.
Maharashtra and Kerala have reported the highest number of new cases. With most schools following the Indian ICSE and CBSE curricula set to re-open tomorrow, June 13, parents are apprehensive about what lies in store.
Meanwhile, a more contagious subvariant of the Covid-19 Omicron strain has been detected in Russia, the country’s senior official at the national consumer health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said. According to the TASS news agency, the BA.4 sub-lineage of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant has been found in Russia. Scientist Kamil Khafizov posted: “The genome of the BA.4 lineage of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been deposited in the VGARus database”. According to Khafizov, those samples were collected in late May.
At present, the BA.2 variant and its sub-variants are dominant in Russia, accounting for about 95% of all new cases. The scientist, citing studies, said BA.4 and BA.5, are a little bit more transmissible than the early forms of Omicron.
His statement added that good herd immunity, acquired through vaccination and previous waves of the novel coronavirus, prevents the spread of new omicron sub-variants in Russia at the moment. “However, a number of researches published lately show that the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-lineages of omicron are slightly more transmissive than earlier versions of the omicron,” the post observed.
While medics and government agencies are aligned in a wait-and-watch approach till an official “fourth wave” is declared, it is significant to note that an empirical study conducted earlier by IIT Kanpur had predicted June as India’s phase of the fourth Omicron-drive wave.
The yet-to-be peer-reviewed study, posted on the preprint repository MedRxiv, used a statistical model to make the prediction, finding that the possible new wave will last for four months.
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