‘Explosive Growth’ in India’s Daily COVID Cases Likely: Cambridge University

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(Photo: The Quint/Kamran Akhter)

India reported 9,195 new COVID cases on Wednesday, 29 December, the highest daily spike in three weeks.

Paul Kattuman, professor at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, which developed India’s COVID-19 tracker said, "It is likely that India will see a period of explosive growth in daily cases and that the intense growth phase will be relatively short,” Bloomberg quoted him as saying.

Stating uncertainty over how high the daily cases might go, Kattuman claimed that “new infections will begin to rise in a few days, possibly within this week.”

Meanwhile, with Delhi reported 496 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, with a test positivity rate of 0.89 percent, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had announced a Level-1 or 'Yellow' alert for the national capital.

Further, Mumbai had reported a 70 percent increase in COVID cases on Tuesday, reporting 1,377 cases, out of 2,172 new COVID cases reported in Maharashtra.

The total count of the highly transmissible COVID-19 variant Omicron has reached 781 in India, with Delhi having the highest count of Omicron cases at 238, followed by Maharashtra with 167 cases.

As India tries to ramp up its vaccination drive before next year’s assembly elections in five states, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) on Tuesday gave emergency use authorization approval to Covovax and Corbevax COVID-19 vaccines along with antiviral drug Molnupiravir, in a bid to strengthen its fight against the pandemic.