COVID Cases Surge Across World; India Next?

The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s Health Secretary asked the States and Union Territories to step up the game against the Covid-19 situation and asked them to follow the “Operational Guidelines for Revised Surveillance Strategy in the context of COVID-19” which calls for early detection, isolation, testing and timely management of suspected and confirmed cases.

This has come to the limelight again as COVID cases took a sudden surge in the US, China and Japan and China getting overwhelmed by Crematoriums bringing China back to square one.

In the wake of these events, it’s essential to monitor existing trends of various COVID variants in order to respond swiftly, said Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan. He also said that it’s essential to speed up the genome sequencing of positive case samples to track the variants through the INSACoG network.

INSACoG is a consortium of 54 laboratories to monitor the genomic variations in the SARS-CoV-2 initiated by the Health Ministry, CSIR and ICMR jointly. Although China is reporting 10,000 cases a day and other countries are showing a spike in COVID cases, India is relatively in a better place with only around 1,200 active cases nationwide. This puts India in a better place to defend itself if steps are taken rightly.