#double mutant

""We have not beaten Covid. No return to normal is right around the corner. Leaving aside the fact that what used to pass for normal was an exhausting ecological suicide pact to begin with, normal isn’t coming back.

Vaccines only provided us with a very temporary reprieve, a little hiatus from worry. Several indicators suggest it may come to an end sooner than we thought.

Neutralizing antibodies — whether our bodies learn how to produce them by surviving an infection or through a vaccine — identify and target the virus by its spike protein. The latest new variant triggering concern has an astonishing 32 mutations of that spike protein, which may make it difficult or impossible for current vaccines to effectively target it.

We shouldn’t be surprised. A study in the respected scientific journal Nature already warned us to expect the virus to evolve to bypass our vaccines and treatments. Two thirds of epidemiologists warned that variants could render vaccines s by March of 2022.

We just didn’t listen."

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EXPLAINER: How worrying is the variant first seen in India?

Image Source : PTI How worrying is the variant first seen in India? For the first time in months, people across England are meeting indoors at pubs, restaurants, cinemas, gyms and elsewhere as coronavirus rules were relaxed this week. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned Britons to be cautious and some of the scientists advising him say restrictions might need to be reimposed quickly because…

WHO classifies Indian Covid strain as ‘variant of concern’

Image Source : PTI WHO classifies Indian Covid strain as ‘variant of concern’ The B-1617 variant of the coronavirus, first identified in India, has been classified as a “variant of concern” at the global level by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, COVID-19 Technical Lead at the WHO, said Monday that the B.1.617 virus variant that was first identified in India had been…

Coronavirus News What’s the biggest challenge now?- To bring things under control, you want to vaccinate more people on a daily basis than the number of new infections.

Remember that a person who gets the first shot today will get the second shot in four to six weeks, and will need two more weeks to develop full immunity. So somebody who starts vaccination today will take two months to develop protective immunity.

ALSO READ: After sweeping India, fierce Covid-19 waves hit other developing nations

This means the vaccination drive has to be sustained over months, many more doses daily than cases. Only then can we reverse the surge. Is the supply of vaccines sufficient to maintain that pace?

Coronavirus Latest News We were still on a rising curve in August, and it seemed like India would cross the 100,000-per-day mark. The peak came in mid-September, when we were pulling roughly 97,000 cases.

But then, suddenly the graph started dropping and for the next five months, the graph kept dropping, dropping.

ALSO READ: SBI allocates Rs 70 crore to combat second wave of Covid-19

There were some seroprevalence surveys being done — that’s when you take blood samples from the population at random and look for the presence of antibodies — and it appeared that maybe 20% to 30% of the overall population had been exposed.

Coronavirus ‘Double Mutant’ Covid Variant.

A new coronavirus ‘double mutant’ covid variant. has been discovered from specimens obtained in India this month. Officials are testing if the variant, where two modifications come together in the same virus, may be more infectious or slight impacted by vaccines.Some 10,787 specimens from 18 Indian states also showed up 771 cases of known variants – 736 of the UK, 34 of the South African and one…

India’s double mutant Covid variant found in 17 countries: WHO

Image Source : AP Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization The double mutant Covid variant — identified as B1617 — that was first detected in India, has spread to ‘at least 17 countries’, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said. Up till April 27, B1617 variant had been detected in over 1,200 sequences uploaded on the open-access database GISAID (the…