A World Health Organization (WHO) official said Monday (May 10) that they have classified the highly infectious COVID variant of the virus spreading in India as a “variant of concern” (Variants of Concern, or VOC).
Inclusion in the WHO’s Variants of Concern category means that there is evidence that the virus variant is more infectious, more lethal, and more resistant to current vaccines and treatments, and already poses a global health threat.
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19 (Central Common Virus, coronavirus), said Monday that preliminary studies have found that the Indian B.1.617 virus variant is more easily transmitted than the original virus, and there is some evidence that the variant may be able to evade vaccines.
“We classify the Indian B.1.617 virus variant as a variant of concern at the global level,” she said in a news release.
“Despite some preliminary studies demonstrating increased transmissibility, we still need more information about this virus variant in all sub-lineages, so we need to do more sequencing, targeted sequencing.” She added.
She said WHO will provide more details in its routine weekly pandemic status report on Tuesday (11).
WHO said last week it is closely monitoring at least 10 coronavirus variants around the world, including India’s B.1.617. Van Kolkhove said the Indian variant was previously labeled as “Variants of Interest” (VOI), and they believe more research is needed to fully understand it. More research is needed to fully understand its properties.
The WHO on Monday classified the Indian variant as a “variant of concern,” Vankhoff explained, “which means that any new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) could infect and spread to anyone in the room, and anyone needs to be concerned. “
She added, “So all people at home, no matter where they live and no matter how the virus spreads, we need to make sure that we are taking all the measures we can to prevent ourselves from getting sick.”
According to WHO, a variant is classified as a “variant of concern” if it proves to be more infectious, more lethal and more resistant to current vaccines and treatments.
The international organization has identified three other variants for classification, including variant B.1.1.7, first discovered in the United Kingdom, which is the most common variant currently circulating throughout the United States, variant B.1.351, first discovered in South Africa, and variant P.1, first discovered in Brazil.
B.1.617 is thought to be behind the recent wave of infections in India.
According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, an average of about 391,000 new cases per day have been reported in India in the past seven days – up about 4 percent from a week ago. On average, about 3,879 people die each day in India from infection with the CCP virus.
Variants of the virus in India have spread to other countries, including the United States.
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