Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya to review Covid situation in 8 states, UTs today

New Delhi, Jan 28: Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya will on Friday review the Covid situation and the public health preparedness to tackle the omicron spread in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Telangana, Lakshadweep, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The review meeting, to be held through video conferencing, is scheduled at 2.30 pm on Friday. Earlier this week, the Indian SARS-COV-2 Genomics Consortia INSACOG said that Omicron is in the community transmission stage in India.

It has become dominant in multiple metro cities where new cases have been rising exponentially, with BA.2 lineage, an infectious sub-variant of Omicron, found in a substantial fraction in the country, INSACOG said.

As many as 9,672 Omicron samples were found in January in genome sequencing constituting 75 per cent of the total sequenced samples of COVID-19, a huge rise from 1,292 in December, the government said on Thursday.

At a press conference, National Centre for Disease Control Director Dr S K Singh said sub-lineages of Omicron -- BA.1 and BA.2 -- were found in sequenced samples while BA.3 has not been found yet. "We were getting more samples of BA.1 earlier mostly in travellers. But now we are seeing that BA.2 has become more prevalent in the community," Singh said.