A health worker collects a swab sample from a traveler at a railway station to test for COVID-19, before he is allowed entry into the city, in Mumbai  |  Photo Credit: AP
Key Highlights
- In a massive surge, Delhi on Thursday reported 15,097 fresh COVID-19cases, the highest single-day rise since May 8
- Maharashtra reports 36,265 new coronavirus cases, including 79 infections of Omicron variant: Health Department
- Gujarat recorded 4,213 new cases of coronavirus on Thursday, taking its tally to 8,44,856, said the Health Department
New Delhi: It took just eight days for the number of cases in India to exceed 1 lakh from 10,000 during the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a comparison, COVID-19 cases reached 1 lakh from 10,000 in 47 days during the second wave a year ago.
During the first COVID-19 wave in 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 virus took 103 days from 10,000 coronavirus cases to near 1 lakh cases (the peak recorded was 98,795).
Last year, the second wave peaked at about 4 lakh cases.
It is clear from the current tally just how quickly the Omicron-led wave is spreading in the community. It is likely to surpass all previous records without much delay.
As of now, the country hasn’t witnessed an increase in oxygen consumption or hospitalisation, but the way COVID 3.0 is quickly spreading in a country with almost 1.4 billion people, this could put a lot of strain on the healthcare system in the days ahead.
In India, there were 1,17,100 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, up from 90,928 the day before, in just 24 hours.
A total of 3,007 Omicron infections have been recorded in the country, according to the Health Ministry.
According to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Omicron is causing hospitalisations and is killing people just like previous variants. Though Omicron is less severe than Delta, especially in the vaccinated, it does not mean it should be classified as mild, said Ghebreyesus.
Billionaire philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, has said that humanity is likely to enter the worst part of the pandemic as the Omicron variant spreads fast across the globe, stressing that it will “hit home for all of us”.
Scientists at the University of Hong Kong found that the Omicron variant multiplies 70 times faster inside human respiratory tract tissue than the Delta variant.
After 48 hours after infection, Omicron reaches higher levels in tissue than Delta. A spate of studies, however, suggested that it does not cause as much lung damage as the previous variants.
Scientists from the United States and Japan conducted a study on hamsters and mice in which they found that those infected with Omicron had less lung damage, lost less weight, and were less likely to die than those infected with other variants.
The Omicron variant, which has up to 36 mutations in the spike protein, prevents vaccines from working. Studies suggest Omicron can cause infection at a lower dose than Delta or the original variant. Omicron has been reported to be less effective at infecting lung cells when it is inside lung tissue than Delta or the original version of the virus.
“The infection is more focused on the bronchia than the lungs and very fast,” Marc Veldhoen, an immunologist at the University of Lisbon, tweeted.
The viral load inside people’s respiratory tracts needs to be measured by scientists.
With Delta, people have 1,000 times more virus particles in their respiratory tracts than they did with the original variants.