COVID-19 News Updates

The fears of the Covid-19 pandemic have resurfaced across the country after several people in Kerala have been infected by the new JN.1 variant. India reported 335 fresh COVID19 cases and five deaths in the last 24 hours.

Considering the upcoming festive season, States were advised to put in place requisite public health measures and other arrangements to minimize risk of increase in transmission of the disease by adherence to maintenance of respiratory hygiene

The case was detected in an RT-PCR positive sample from Karakulam in Thiruvananthapuram district of the southern state on December 8, Dr Rajiv Bahl, Director General of the ICMR, said.

The country's COVID-19 case tally stands at 4,50,03,055 (4.50 crore) and the death toll at 5,33,306 (5.33 lakh), the data updated at 8 am showed.

In a recent respiratory virus update, the CDC said that JN.1, is part of the same lineage of BA.2.86 and contains an extra spike mutation -- L455S mutation, which has immune-evasion properties. 

The findings, detailed in the journal Virologica Sinica, the publishing arm of the Chinese Society for Microbiology (CSM), showed that the viruses belong to 22 families including arenavirus, coronavirus, astrovirus, pestivirus, parvovirus, and papillomavirus.

The new vaccines, according to experts, are especially important as we enter the winter season when Covid-19, flu, and RSV (Respiratory syncytial virus) infections are on the rise, reports Forbes.

According to data published by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) from the last week of September, the number of people testing positive for the virus increased by over 29.4 per cent on the week before, despite a reduced testing infrastructure, reports The Independent. 

With 2,257 cases being recorded daily, the UK is currently seeing a fresh rise in Covid-19 infections.

The fresh cases are reportedly due to the new variant nicknamed BA.2.86, dubbed as Pirola. 

Long Covid is an often debilitating illness that reportedly occurs in at least 10 per cent of patients after a Covid-19 infection and includes fatigue, brain fog, headaches, chest pain, and heart palpitations.

Researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology identified two adjacent, co-occurring amino acid mutations in the nucleocapsid protein (N-protein) of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is directly involved in viral replication within the host, meaning that it also interacts with the immune system.

In the paper published in the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, the team said that this is further compounded by inclusion of poorly conducted studies into systematic reviews and pooled data analyses that end up overstating the risk yet again.

In the study, Shi and colleagues from the Wuhan Institute of Virology evaluated the human spillover risk of 40 coronavirus species. 

In the study, published in the journal Cureus, the team included 40 patients, with 26 (65 per cent) classified as having moderate Covid, six (15 per cent) classified as having severe Covid, and the remaining having mild Covid.