New Delhi: The Union Health Minister on Friday urged the people to maintain social distance and wear a mask in public areas. The government of India reported a hike in Covid-19 cases in the last few days.
According to the government – India has the lowest fatality rate and now the vaccine is here but this is not the time to be negligent regarding Covid’s appropriate behavior. Cases are rising in six states due to people’s carelessness. I urge all to abide by social distancing and wear masks.
The Union Health Minister urged people – when Maharashtra, Kerala, Punjab Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu reports spike in coronavirus cases.
Maharashtra on Friday logged 15,817 fresh cases, breaching the 15,000 daily case count for the first time in 162 days, according to the state’s health department. Kerala, on the other hand, reported 1,780 new cases taking the state’s infection tally to 1,087,443.
Local administrations in Maharashtra – have already put in place full or partial lockdowns in several districts, chief minister Uddhav Thackeray has warned that they may have to shut down more places if the cases continue to rise.
The central government in its statement said that “the government had earlier deputed high-level teams to Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Jammu and Kashmir to support them in their fight against the spike in Covid-19 cases.”
The US-based scientist – Jesse Bloom said that “Other scientists are trying to stay ahead of SARS-CoV-2’s evolution by predicting which mutations are likely to be important.” Jesse Bloom is an evolutionary virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington
Sujeet Kumar Singh, Director, NCDC also confirmed with IANS that over 24,000 mutations in the virus have been recorded in India. “We have found these mutations in over 6,000 variants and submitted it to an international consortium which collects the data to predict and analyze trends of virus spread in geographical locations,” he said.
The scientists presented their findings of an analysis of over 5,000 coronavirus variants and how they have evolved over the course of the pandemic.
-Vinayak