India Reports 92, 000 Cases of Infections with COVID-19 in 24 Hours

The health authorities in India have registered 92, 596  new infections with the Coronavirus (known also as COVID-19) within the last 24 hours.

The total number of infections grew to 29, 089 million since the outbreak of the disease.

Also, the Ministry of Health in India revealed that the deadly virus claimed the lives of 2219 people so the death toll rose to 353 thousand deaths.

The Times of India said that 162 thousand confirmed cases recovered from the COVID-19 throughout the last 24 hours as the figure of the recovered people is estimated at 27, 5  million.

According to the latest data, the number of active cases in India declined to1,231 million.

The newspaper added that it hasn't been long since the COVID-19 cases in India started to decline after having claimed several lives. And now researchers have warned about a new variant of the virus which can cause severe symptoms. The new SARS-CoV-2 variant has been detected by the National Institute of Virology, Pune from genome sequencing samples collected from international travelers from the UK and Brazil.

The new B.1.1.28.2 variant was isolated from nasal and throat swabs of international travelers, which were later assessed in the Syrian hamster model and compared with the B.1 variant. The findings of the study revealed that the new variant can cause severe infection and neutralization reduction can be a great concern.

Similar to the original coronavirus, this new variant also affects the upper respiratory system leading to symptoms like breathlessness, fever, cough, and dizziness. Along with this, the new variant detected from international travelers can also lead to weight loss, viral replication in the respiratory tract, lung lesions, and severe lung infection.

Following the discovery of the new powerful variant of coronavirus, the researchers suggested that the finding points towards the necessity of genomic surveillance and characterization of SARS-CoV-2 variants. They added that this would help to understand the virus's pathogenicity and immune escape potential for preparedness purposes.