India may see surging cases within days, says Cambridge tracker
Mpost bureau
New Delhi: India may see a spurt in the Covid growth rate within days and head into an intense but short-lived virus wave as the highly-infectious Omicron variant moves through the crowded nation of almost 1.4 billion.
"It is likely that India will see a period of explosive growth in daily cases and that the intense growth phase will be relatively short," Paul Kattuman, professor at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge which has developed a Covid-19 India tracker, wrote in an email to Bloomberg.
"New infections will begin to rise in a few days, possibly within this week," he said, adding that it was hard to predict how high the daily cases could go.
Kattuman and his team of researchers, developers of the India Covid tracker, are seeing a sharp rise in infection rates across India. The tracker spotlighted six states as a "significant concern" in a December 24 note, with an adjusted growth rate of new cases exceeding 5 per cent. This had expanded to 11 Indian states by December 26, according to the tracker, which corrects for "day of the week effects" and other variations.
India added 9,195 Covid cases on Wednesday — the highest new daily cases in three weeks — pushing the total confirmed tally to 34.8 million infections. The total number of fatalities so far is 480,592 deaths. The country is already gearing up to prevent another massive outbreak even though only 781 cases of the highly-mutated Omicron have been identified so far.
Last week, it allowed booster shots and included teenagers aged 15 to 18 in the inoculation programme.
New Delhi closed cinemas, schools and gyms and introduced restrictions on public gatherings on Tuesday — a day after it reported the most new cases in more than four months. Night curfew kicks in from 10 pm to 5 am and bars, restaurants as well as offices will have 50 per cent occupancy. Mumbai, the country's financial capital, also reported a surge in new cases to 1,377 on Tuesday.
Maharashtra minister Aaditya Thackeray on Wednesday urged people not to panic, but to exercise extreme caution in the wake of a sharp rise in cases in Mumbai and stressed vaccination and widespread use of face masks.
He said Mumbai's daily COVID-19 case count is expected to cross the 2,000-mark on Wednesday. The city had recorded 1,377 cases on Tuesday, contributing heavily to the statewide tally of 2,172.
NCP Lok Sabha MP Supriya Sule on Wednesday said she has tested positive for COVID 19.
Sule (51), Lok Sabha MP from Baramati and daughter of NCP chief Sharad Pawar, said her husband Sadanand Sule has also been detected with the infection.
India has recorded 781 cases of the Omicron variant of Coronavirus across 21 states and UTs so far out of which 241 people have recovered or migrated, according to the Union Health ministry data updated on Wednesday. Delhi recorded the maximum number of 238 cases followed by Maharashtra at 167, Gujarat 73, Kerala 65 and Telangana 62.
Delhi logged 923 new Covid cases with no deaths being reported while the daily positivity rate was at 1.29 per cent. Active cases registered were at 2,191 and the death toll at 25,107.
With 9,195 people testing positive for Coronavirus infection in a day, India's total tally of Covid cases rose to 3,48,08,886, while the active cases increased to 77,002, according to the data updated at 8 am.
The death toll has climbed to 4,80,592 with 302 fresh fatalities, the data stated.
The daily rise in new infections has been recorded below 15,000 for the last 62 days now.
An increase of 1,546 cases has been recorded in the active Covid caseload in a span of 24 hours.
The cumulative vaccine doses administered in the country crossed 143.75 crore on Wednesday, the ministry said.
As many as 57,03,410 vaccine doses had been administered till 7 pm on Wednesday, it said.
