Mansukh Mandaviya, Union Health Minister, will review the Covid-19 situation and the public health preparedness for the fight against omicron spreading in eight states and territories.
This is scheduled to take place on Friday, January 28, 2002.
The video conference will be held with Mansukh Mandaviya, Union Health Minister.
Review meeting scheduled for 2.30 PM today. It will be conducted via video conferencing.
On January 24, Mandaviya held a similar meeting with nine state and union territory health ministers, namely Jammu and Kashmir (Haryana, Punjab), Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, and Chandigarh.
The Indian SARS-COV-2 Genomics Consortia INSACOG stated that Omicron had reached the community transmission stage in India.
It is now the dominant strain in many metro areas, where there has been an exponential rise in new cases.
The BA.2 lineage, an infectious variant of Omicron, was found in a significant fraction of the country, INSACOG stated.
According to the government, 9,672 Omicron DNA samples were found in January.
This represents 75 percent of all the sequenced Covid-19 samples.
It is a significant increase from the 1,292 samples in December.
A press conference was held by Dr. S K Singh, Director of the National Centre for Disease Control.
He stated that sub-lineages Omicron — BA.1 & BA.2 — were discovered in sequenced samples, and BA.3 is still unknown.
“We used to get more BA.1 samples from travellers, but now we are seeing that it is becoming more popular in the community.”
Singh stated that BA.2 is now more common in the community.
The Union Health Minister reiterated the importance of increasing testing in the States/UTs.
RTPCR was requested for States/UTs with lower RTPCR testing rates to improve their tests.
States and UTs were reminded to be vigilant about emerging hotspots and monitor the state’s hospitalizations and deaths.
Dr. Mandaviya said that with our experience, `Test-Track-Treat-Vaccinate and Adherence to Covid Appropriate Behaviour` along with monitoring of cases remains crucial for Covid management.
