Coronavirus Live Updates: ‘India detected 300 Omicron sub-lineages, none settled’

India has detected nearly 300 sub-lineages of Omicron variant in the past one year, Dr N K Arora, the co-chair of Indian SARS-CoV-2 genomics consortium (Insacog), said on Saturday.

He said none of these variants were able to settle in the community, which indicates high immunity.

“We conduct tests on sewage samples also and the trends so far are not suggestive of any increase in cases. I would therefore advise people to not panic. However, caution is key,” said the co-chair of Insacog.

Three years into the pandemic, the coronavirus continues to impress virus experts with its swift evolution.

A young version, known as XBB.1.5, has quickly been spreading in the United States over the past few weeks. As of Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that it made up 72% of new cases in the Northeast and 27.6% of cases across the country.

The new subvariant, first sampled in autumn in New York state, has a potent array of mutations that appear to help it evade immune defenses and improve its ability to invade cells.

China has said it will no longer impose criminal charges on those violating Covid-19 "prevention and control measures or provisions on frontier health and quarantine" starting January 8, the Chinese state media reported citing circular released by authorities on Saturday.

"Relevant cases in the process of handling should be handled in a timely and prompt manner in accordance with provisions of the Criminal Law and the Criminal Procedure Law," the document read, according to Xinhua news agency.

The circular adds that suspects and defendants in custody for such violations should be released in accordance with the laws, and properties involved in the cases that are sealed up, seized, or frozen should be freed.

On January 8, China will downgrade its management of COVID-19 from Class A to Class B, and remove COVID-19 from its list of quarantinable infectious diseases, according to Xinhua.

Germany on Saturday discouraged non-essential trips to China, the world's most populous nation, which is struggling with a surge in Covid cases after relaxing strict virus restrictions. "We currently discourage non-essential trips to China. The reason is a peak in Covid infections and an overwhelmed health system," the German foreign ministry said on Twitter. More than a dozen countries have slapped fresh travel regulations on travellers from China.

China is no longer adopting preventive measures to stop the country's Covid spread and is allowing Chinese nationals to move and travel as per their wishes, The Hong Kong Post reported, adding that this could result in a 2020-like situation when the pathogen spread across the world from Wuhan. According to some media reports, China is trying to get its entire population infected by Covid so that it could achieve herd immunity and refocus on economic development. However, the situation on the ground, according to reports, is chaotic with people are dying in their thousands.

The Chinese government on Saturday ordered the release of people detained over a host of coronavirus-related incidents, a day ahead of Beijing's plan to scrap its three-year-old stringently implemented zero-Covid policy. China will end its international isolation from 12 AM on Sunday, fully opening its airports and ports for travel and trade, amid a massive coronavirus outbreak in the country. International travelers can arrive in China without nucleic acid tests and quarantine restrictions once the restrictions are gone.

China on Saturday marked the first day of "chun yun", the 40-day period of Lunar New Year travel known pre-pandemic as the world's largest annual migration of people, bracing for a huge increase in travellers and the spread of COVID-19 infections. This Lunar New Year public holiday, which officially runs from Jan. 21, will be the first since 2020 without domestic travel restrictions.

Neutralising antibody responses against the SARS-COV-2 virus and its variants of concern (VoC) are higher among Covishield recipients than those who took the indigenously made Covaxin, according to a multi-centre study.

China has suspended or closed the social media accounts of more than 1,000 critics of the government’s policies on the Covid-19 outbreak, as the country moves to further open up. The popular Sina Weibo social media platform said it had addressed 12,854 violations including attacks on experts, scholars and medical workers and issued temporary or permanent bans on 1,120 accounts.

As many as 11 Covid-positive samples, including four from Mumbai, were sent for genome sequencing to the National Institute of Virology, Pune, according to the state government’s daily Covid update. Of these, results of two patients — a 16-year old boy from Goa and a 25-year-old woman from Navi Mumbai — were made available late in the evening, showing presence of Omicron’s BQ 1. 1 variant that is widely found in the US. The other patients are from Pune (3), Tamil Nadu (1) and Uttar Pradesh (1).

China's CanSino Biologics Inc has entered "test production phase" for its Covid-19 mRNA booster vaccine, the company said in a post on its social media account late on Thursday. The vaccine, known as CS-2034, targets new Omicron variants of the virus, which are responsible for the vast majority of infections that have swept across China since the country began dismantling strict Covid curbs last month.

Thehealth ministry said 1. 9 lakh tests were conducted in last 24 hours of which 228 (0. 1%) came positive. On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, 173, 134, 175, and 188 cases of Covid-19 were recorded in the country in 24 hours.
At the Delhi airport, where arandom screening of 2% of people arriving from other countries has been conducted since December 24, sources said, 46 out of 5,100 passengers have tested positive.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday said it does not expect Astrazeneca's's COVID-19 antibody cocktail Evusheld to neutralize the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5.

Air passengers arriving from China will need to show a negative Covid-19 test to enter the Netherlands from next week, the Dutch health ministry said on Friday.

More than a dozen countries have slapped fresh travel regulations on travellers from the world's most populous nation, which is facing a surge in Covid cases following its decision to relax strict virus restrictions.

The Dutch measures, which will come into force on Tuesday, are in line with European Union recommendations, the ministry said.

"I think it is important for us bring in travel restrictions as part of European anti-Covid measures," Health Minister Ernst Kuipers said.

Chinese President Xi Jinping defended his COVID-19 policy in his public address on the occasion of the new year, calling it "rational and well-thought-out."

In his first public address on new year, Xi Jinping did not speak about the government's unpreparedness and the sudden cancellation of the zero-COVID policy that led to a surge in COVID-19 cases in China, Geo-Politik reported.

He said that they have adopted the COVID response following a "science-based and targeted approach."