Amid fears of looming third wave of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) remains, rising cases of the Delta variant and the subsequent mutations of the virus have now made the probability look a real risk for India, a foreign brokerage firm has cautioned.
According to a PTI report, Tanvee Gupta-Jain, chief economist of UBS Securities India, said the third wave risks are real even more now as economic activity has improved sequentially for the seventh successive week to July 12, with several states gradually easing curbs on movement. The UBS report further said the pace of vaccination has also slowed down to under 3.4 million doses per day as against four million jabs earlier along with 45 per cent of the daily Covid-19 case count being reported from the rural regions of India.
In a note on Wednesday, Jain said that although the number of daily Covid-19 cases seems to have plateaued, the same still remains much above the 2021 trough and the drop in active caseload has also started to narrow down.
The report added that in more than 20 per cent of the top districts accounting for most of the daily cases and where the second wave of Covid-19 has not yet dialled down, the third wave has already set firmly in. The figure was only 5 per cent even a month before, it said.
Meanwhile, World Health Organization (WHO) director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday said the Covid-19 pandemic is now in the “early stages” of the third wave. “The Delta variant is now in more than 111 countries and we expect it to soon be the dominant Covid-19 strain circulating worldwide, if it isn’t already,” an UN report quoted Ghebreyesus as saying.
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