India sees decrease in COVID-19 daily cases

NEW DELHI: FEB. 1 – India on Tuesday reported 167,059 new COVID-19 cases, a huge decrease over the number of January 20, when the country reported 347,254 cases in a single day.

Some officials of India’s federal health ministry believe that the daily number of COVID-19 cases is likely to reduce across the country in the days to come.

Officials say the vaccination drive, which now includes the 15-18 year group and booster doses for health workers and other frontline workers, has been effective in containing the ongoing third wave of the pandemic.

According to the health ministry, so far over 1.66 billion vaccine doses have been administered.

Virologist Gagandeep Kang said though the Omicron variant has the potential to get transmitted at a rate never seen before, it did not lead to severity like the Delta variant.

Kang said that vaccines do work against this variant although not as well as they did against Alpha and Delta.

Maninder Agarwal, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, who has been tracking the movement of the pandemic waves, said the peak of the third wave in India has already passed.

“We believe that the peak of Omicron (pandemic) in India is already behind us. It happened a few days ago and the trajectory now is going to go down,” Agarwal said.

Last week, the media reported that the federal government is likely to issue an advisory to reopen schools across the country.

The government of the Indian capital Delhi has ended the weekend curfew and odd-even curbs for markets in the national capital region. The authorities have also decided to allow the opening of restaurants, bars and cinema halls with 50-percent capacity.

-Xinhua