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The World Health Organization has said a variant of COVID-19 feared to be contributing to a surge in coronavirus cases in India has been found in over a dozen countries.
The UN health agency said the B.1.617 variant of COVID-19 first found in India had as of Tuesday been detected in over 1,200 sequences uploaded to the GISAID open-access database “from at least 17 countries.”
“Most sequences were uploaded from India, the United Kingdom, USA and Singapore,” the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic.
The WHO recently listed B.1.617 — which counts several sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics — as a “variant of interest”.
But so far it has stopped short of declaring it a “variant of concern.” That label would indicate that it is more dangerous that the original version of the virus by for instance being more transmissible, deadly or able to dodge vaccine protections.
India is facing surging new cases and deaths in the pandemic, and fears are rising that the variant could be contributing to the unfolding catastrophe.
Temporary ban
Filipinos living in India are included in the temporary ban that the Philippines imposed on travelers from that country, the Department of Health said Wednesday.
The ban on such travel from India will take effect at 12:01 a.m. on April 29 and end on May 14.
Travelers who are already in transit and those who will arrive in the Philippines before Thursday are exempted.
“It was decided that even our fellow Filipinos will not be allowed entry for this temporary period,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in an online briefing.
“This is just so that we can be able to ensure that our borders will be protected,” Vergeire added.
The Philippines joined several countries that have imposed restrictions on travelers from India, which is battling a surge in COVID-19 infections that has overwhelmed its healthcare system.
The Bureau of Immigration is preparing for the implementation of restrictions for persons traveling from India.
“We are conducting a 100 percent passport inspection to determine the travel history of an arriving person,” BI port operations division acting chief Carlos Capulong said Wednesday.
“If we see that the traveler has been to India within the last 14 days, then he will be excluded and boarded on the next available flight back to his port of origin,” Capulong said.
Capulong said the travel ban is not “nationality-specific” and applies to any traveler coming from India.
Experts fear that B.1.617, a new coronavirus variant described as a “double mutant,” is contributing to the spike in cases in India. It has been reportedly found in at least 17 countries.
Vergeire said the Philippine government decided to tighten border control to prevent the entry of the new variant.
The DOH also called on the public to continue adhering to public health protocols to protect themselves from the virus.
The Philippines has so far detected 659 B.1.1.7 (United Kingdom) variant cases, 695 B.1.351 (South Africa) variant cases, 2 P.1 (Brazil) variant cases, and 148 cases of the P.3 variant first detected in Central Visayas.
Co-founder confident
BioNTech co-founder Ugur Sahin on Wednesday voiced confidence that the vaccine that his company jointly developed with Pfizer works against the Indian variant of the coronavirus.
“We are still testing the Indian variant, but the Indian variant has mutations that we have already tested for and which our vaccine works against, so I am confident,” said Sahin.
“The vaccine is cleverly built, and I’m convinced the bulwark will hold. And if we have to strengthen the bulwark again, then we will do it, that I’m not worried about,” he added.
The BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine was the first to win authorization in the West, and has since been deployed in dozens of countries worldwide.
Giving an update of the authorization process in China, Sahin said approval was “very possible in July”.
“We are almost through with all questions,” he said.
Travel restrictions
Senator Risa Hontiveros on Wednesday pressed the Department of Health and the Inter-Agency Task Force for Emerging Infectious Diseases to create and strictly enforce guidelines for “automatic travel bans” to and from countries with high COVID-19 infections or new variants.
On the other hand, Senator Christopher Go, Chair of the Senate Committee on Health, urged the IATF to continuously review and adjust the travel protocols in place to prevent the entry of new and potentially more infectious COVID-19 variants from other countries into the Philippines.
Hontiveros questioned why the IATF and DOH still did not have established protocols for imposing travel bans more than a year into the pandemic.
She called out Health Secretary Francisco Duque’s initial statement that the new double-mutant variant in India was ‘not concerning’ despite India’s health experts revealing that this causes severe infection among children.
The Philippines’ COVID-19 cases, she said, were quickly catching up with Indonesia, which has the most in the number of total cases in ASEAN, but lagged way behind it in terms of vaccination progress.
“The numbers tell us clearly that we have the worst COVID-19 situation in the whole region. There is no denying that. The public is already helpless over COVID-19 especially that the government is not alert in protecting us,” said Hontiveros.
The explosion in infections in India — 350,000 new cases were recorded there on Tuesday alone — has driven a surge in global cases to 147.7 million.
The virus has now killed more than 3.1 million people worldwide.
India is facing surging new cases and deaths in the pandemic, and fears are rising that the variant could be contributing to the unfolding catastrophe.
The World Health Organization has said the B.1.617 variant of COVID-19 first found in India had as of Tuesday been detected in “at least 17 countries”.
The WHO acknowledged that its preliminary modelling based on sequences submitted to GISAID indicates “that B.1.617 has a higher growth rate than other circulating variants in India, suggesting potential increased transmissibility”.
It stressed that other variants circulating at the same time were also showing increased transmissibility and that the combination “may be playing a role in the current resurgence in this country.”
“Indeed, studies have highlighted that the spread of the second wave has been much faster than the first,” the WHO said.
It highlighted though that “other drivers” could be contributing to the surge, including lax adherence to public health measures as well as mass gatherings.
“Further investigation is needed to understand the relative contribution of these factors,” it said.
The UN agency also stressed that “further robust studies” into the characteristics of B.1.617 and other variants, including impacts on transmissibility, severity and the risk of reinfection, were “urgently needed.” With AFP