NEW DELHI – While battling a massive increase in coronavirus cases, India is lagging behind many other countries in the genomic sequencing needed to track emerging variants, leaving a blind spot for local and global health officials.
The country has become ground zero before the pandemic, with more than 200,000 daily contamination cases this week, higher than an earlier peak in September. With its population of more than 1.3 billion people and sky-high infections, India has a higher chance of developing variants that can take root and spread across borders, public health experts said.
“Where you’ve affected so many people, there’s a higher chance” of new strains because there are more opportunities for the virus to mutate, said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher focused on gene therapy and cell technology at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. . “The size of the infected population is what drives the emergence of new variants.”
Even with robust sequencing, countries may struggle to control highly contagious variants with public health interventions, experts said. Countries that don’t do much genomic sequencing are blind spots where a species can develop and spread to multiple countries before it is discovered. Scientists have still not been able to definitively determine where the British, South African and Brazilian variants came from.
Last month, the Indian Ministry of Health said its labs had detected all three variants in collected samples, along with a new “double-mutant variant,” which public health experts say may have originated in India. The species has two mutations, which have previously been seen separately in other variants, but never together in one variant.