You know it’s any other news when most channels furnish reporting of a single case or two or three in a village or district that never really had COVID 19. That’s because sooner than later, every other place was going to be afflicted by the novel COVID 19 virus. But you know there’s something tense when the chief minister of a state writes on Twitter addressing the PM toward a new variant, speaking genuinely and heartfully instead of lashing out meaninglessly.
So when Shri Arvind Kejriwal took to Twitter to request PM Modi’s attention about the new variant from South Africa, you knew it was the case of the the latter, and that things were beginning to look a bit tense.
But the key question is, what did the Delhi CM tell the honourable PM of the country and what did he have to say about the status of India at present where it comes to dealing with the COVID 19 situation?
“I urge Hon’ble PM to stop flights from those countries which are affected by new variant. With great difficulty, our country has recovered from Corona. We shud do everything possible to prevent this new variant from entering India!”
Frankly, there was nothing incorrect about what Shri Kejriwal said to the PM, requesting a political luminary to take cognizance of the fact that the new variant wasn’t supposed to be taken any lightly.
But having said that, there are some urgent measures that India has already taken toward dealing with a situation that must not be allowed to spiral out of control:
All passengers from South Africa, Hong Kong & Botswana will be screened & tested, even if they are carrying vaccination certificates or – ve RTPCR test. They will be home isolated & if found +ve, sample will be sent for genome sequencing to check for new variant.
The above Twitter update told, the following is what one notes on the issue as per a news update from NDTV:
The variant – first detected in South Africa this week, and since reported from Botswana, Hong Kong, Israel, and Belgium – is believed to have 50 mutations, including over 30 on the spike protein and 10 on the receptor binding domain.
All those arriving from abroad will be home isolated and if found positive, sample will be sent for genome sequencing to check for new variant, it said.
Genome is like an instruction manual that contains information about the makeup of an organism, and genome sequencing is a technique that reads and interprets genetic information.
All of that said, at a time where much of the world would so gladly have been wanting to focus on 2022, the new year, it’s nowhere near ideal to see India struggling much like the other countries with a new variant. While 2020, truth be told, completely held the world by the scruff of its neck with the coming of the pandemic, COVID 19 settling to take one and all by surprise, much of 2021 was spent in recovering and rediscovering the lost groove.
And right at the fag end of the year with just a month remaining before the world progresses onto face 2022, here’s the new COVID variant from South Africa. What will Omicron do? It’s already spread to Germany, parts of Belgium among other destinations.