This 'double mutant' variant is adding fuel to India's COVID-19 crisis

Human behavior is probably more to blame for the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic than the new mutants arising around the country. But the combination of these two is proving catastrophic.

Every day for a whole week, India has reported an average of 340,000 new coronavirus cases; on Wednesday deaths exceeded 3,300. Many experts suspect that numbers could be even higher. The country now accounts for one in every three infections reported worldwide daily.

“The major factor in the spread of the virus is the behavior of the people. Spread of the virus is largely because of us not taking care of each other. Variants are just taking advantage of our carelessness,” says Rakesh Mishra, director of the Indian Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology.

This surge of COVID-19 cases comes three months after the Indian health minister announced "India has successfully contained the pandemic." He believed that studies based on a mathematical "Indian Supermodel" suggested the country “may have reached herd immunity” through natural infections. But the model was flawed, and the results skewed by the lack of accurate data. Now the number of daily new infections has crippled the healthcare system; oxygen and PPE supplies have run out, there are no hospital beds available, and patients are dying on sidewalks and streets as they wait outside hospitals.

Alarmed by the local outbreaks of B.1.1.7, the variant first discovered in the United Kingdom, the government formed a multi-laboratory network named the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomic Consortium (INSACOG) to monitor the evolution of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. On March 24, after sequencing less than one percent of coronavirus samples collected by its member laboratories across the country, INSACOG announced it had found “a new double mutant variant.” What alarmed scientists was that the variant carried features from two worrisome lineages; the variants first identified in California (B.1.427 and B.1.429), and those discovered in South Africa (B.1.351) and Brazil (P.1).

Although it wasn’t noticed at the time, the mutant had in fact been sequenced and its genetic code deposited in the global database as early as in October 2020, but “it seemed like it just wasn't on anybody's radar screen,” says David Montefiori, who studies viral immunology and vaccine development at Duke Human Vaccine Institute. This new variant has spread fast, causing more than 60 percent of all coronavirus infections in the Indian state of Maharashtra alone, which reported the largest number of all COVID-19 cases in India. ...