As parts of the country witness a surge in coronavirus infections, the Centre has asked the states and union territories to submit "larger number" of samples for whole genome sequencing from districts and areas seeing a surge in Covid-19 cases over a period of seven days, according to official sources.
Sources on Saturday said the direction was issued during Friday's meeting by the INSACOG which reviewed the Covid-19 data to check the possibility of any new emerging variant or sub-variant and ascertain the reasons behind the breakthrough infections.
An official said, "The idea behind asking states and Union territories to send larger number of samples is to keep a closer watch over the current circulating sublineagues of Omicron and its correlation to the current epidemiological picture.
"Also, we want to see if we are missing out any important clues regarding newer sub variants during routine sequencing through the sentinel surveillance."
As on date, 10 states and union territories —Maharashtra, Kerala, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, West Bengal, and Gujarat— have over 1,000 cases.
Thirty-two districts in India including 11 from Kerala and five from Maharashtra are reporting a weekly Covid positivity rate of more than 10 per cent while in 35 districts, including nine from Delhi, the weekly positivity is 5-10 per cent, according to sources.
The official said, "The last review meeting that there is no variant of concern in the country as of now. India now has BA.4 and BA.5 in addition to BA.2 which have slightly higher transmissibility as compared to other Omicron sub lineages."
The INSACOG is a joint initiative of the Department of Biotechnology under the ministries of science and technology, and health to carry out genome sequencing of the virus to understand how it spreads and evolves.
India on Saturday reported a single day rise of 13,216 new coronavirus infections, taking the total tally of Covid-19 cases to 4,32,83,793, according to the Union Health Ministry's morning update. With this, active cases increased to 68,108. The death toll climbed to 5,24,840 with 23 new fatalities.
Although there is a rise in cases, there is no associated increase in hospitalisation or deaths, according to health experts. They say the increase is limited to a few districts.
The complacency among people towards following Covid-appropriate behaviour in addition to people not being enthusiastic about taking booster doses of vaccines possibly has increased the pool of population susceptible to Covid-19 infections.
In addition, there is an increased mobility due to summer holidays, easing of travel restrictions -both nationally and internationally- and full-fledged opening up of economic activities, because of which there is spread of infection among vulnerable individuals, as per experts.
(With PTI inputs)
