NEW DELHI – While battling the huge increase in coronavirus cases, India is pursuing many other countries in the genomic sequencing needed to track emerging variants, creating a blind spot for local and global health officials.
The country has become a zero point for the pandemic, surpassing 200,000 daily cases of infection this week, higher than a previous peak in September. With a population of over 1.3 billion people and growing infections, India is more likely to develop variants that could take root and spread beyond its borders, public health experts said.
“Where you have so many people affected, there is a better chance” of new strains, because there are more opportunities for the virus to move, said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher focused on gene therapy and cell engineering at MIT’s Broad Institute and Harvard. “It is the size of the infected population that determines the emergence of new variants.”
Even with robust sequencing, countries can struggle to control highly infectious variants with public health interventions, experts said. Nations that do not do too much genomic sequencing are blind spots where a strain can develop and spread to several countries before discovery. Scientists have not yet been able to definitively determine where the variants from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil come from.
Last month, the Indian Ministry of Health said its laboratories had detected all three variants in the samples collected, along with a new “double mutant variant”, which public health experts say could have come from India. The stem has two mutations, previously seen separately in other variants, but never together in a single variant.