India Must Be Prepared For Another Covid Outbreak: Expert

India must be prepared for another Covid-19 outbreak, said an expert on Friday, amid rise in cases in several countries including the US and South Korea.

According to estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Covid infections are increasing across 25 states in the country. South Korea is also seeing an outbreak with a significant number of related hospitalisations.

The latest update from the World Health Organization (WHO) showed that between June 24 and July 21, an average of 17,358 Covid specimens were tested for SARS-CoV-2 every week across 85 countries.

India also witnessed 908 new Covid-19 cases, and two deaths between June and July this year, as per the WHO.

“While the situation isn’t severe in India as in the other countries, we need to be really prepared for it,” Professor Deepak Sehgal, Virologist at the Shiv Nadar University in Noida, told IANS.

“The virus has certainly reemerged. And the WHO reported that there have been around 26 per cent of the deaths and 11 per cent increase in the occurrence of this virus. And that is quite alarming,” he added.

The recent outbreak is driven by KP variants — belonging to the Omicron lineage. Omicron was highly transmissible and showed great immune escape. First identified globally in January, KP.2 is a descendant of Omicron’s JN.1. In India, KP.2 was first detected in December 2023 in Odisha.