NEW DELHI – Due to a tremendous increase in coronavirus cases, India is following many other countries in the genomic order needed to detect emerging variants, creating a blind spot for local and global health officials.
The country has become the biggest zero for the pandemic and 200,000 daily infection cases this week are higher than an earlier high in September. With a population of more than 1.3 billion people and infections soaring, India has a greater chance of developing variants that could potentially take root and spread beyond its borders, public health experts said.
“Where so many people are affected, there is a greater chance” for new strains, because there are more opportunities for the virus to mutate, says Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher focusing on gene therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “The size of the infected population is what drives the emergence of new varieties.”
Even with robust sequencing, countries can struggle to curb many contagious variants with interventions on public health, experts say. Nations that do not do much genomic sequencing are blind spots where a strain can develop and spread to multiple countries before being discovered. Scientists have not yet been able to definitively determine where the British, South African and Brazilian variants originated.
Last month, the Indian Ministry of Health said its laboratories had detected all three variants in collected samples, along with a new ‘double-mutant variant’, which according to public health experts may have originated in India. The strain has two mutations, previously seen separately in other variants, but never together in one variant.