To gauge the spread of new Omicron variant across Mumbai and Pune which is most affected with Omicron will now be part of the community surveillance which will be soon started by the Maharashtra Government. This comes after the central government directed the state government to understand the spread of the virus in these two cities. Health officials said they have been asked to conduct community surveillance of all positive cases in Mumbai and Pune following which they will be coming up with new strategies to handle the third wave of covid-19.
Dr Pradeep Vyas, Maharashtra Additional Chief Secretary Health said that after the meeting with the Central Government on Thursday, they have to send all the positive cases under community surveillance in Mumbai and Pune for genome sequencing. This will help them plan new strategies against covid-19.
“Omicron infections are increasing rapidly in the world and patients are also being detected in Maharashtra. These patients can be found not only in big cities but also in small towns. We have been asked to conduct genome sequencing of each positive case found in Mumbai and Pune which will start soon,” he said.
Besides sequencing infected travellers’ positive samples, research labs are sequencing positive samples from the daily Covid cases to track the variants of SARS-CoV-2 in the community. Barring Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur, the whole genome sequencing work — reinforced in the wake of the concern over Omicron — is currently representing only a few cities.
Experts say genomic research need collaborative work across all the districts to rule out the community spread of extremely contagious variants like Omicron. District officials entrusted with the responsibility of sending adequate positive Covid samples from their jurisdiction for sequencing to the designated research labs, however, underlined the drastic decline in positive cases, resulting in uneven representation in the sequencing work at the state level.
Incidentally, districts like Akola and Amaravati were the first to report the Delta variant in India in December 2020, which eventually led to widespread Covid cases across the country during the second wave.
“Every district is supposed to send 100 positive samples fitting the criteria every month to the designated research labs. That means a total of 3,600 positive Covid samples should undergo genomic sequencing in Maharashtra every month. However, we have been able to send about 2,400 samples for sequencing in November. Of them, almost 60-70% samples are from big cities like Mumbai and Pune, and only 30% are from the remaining 34 districts,” said a senior health official, requesting anonymity.
