Is Omicron sub-variant, driving Covid surge in China fatal for brain? Govt busts misleading article

A Chinese news media had reported that the coronavirus subvariant surging in China may be evolving to attack the brain.

New Delhi, Jan 02: The government on Monday rejected news reports claiming that the evolving Omicron sub-variant may be fatal for the brain as misleading and fake.

The Fact Check Unit of Press Information Bureau of government has said that the relevance to humans has not been proved by the study referred to in the news report.

A Chinese news media had reported that the coronavirus subvariant surging in China may be evolving to attack the brain.

The study challenges previous assumptions that viruses usually evolve to become less dangerous, South China Morning Post reported.

"New research on the Omicron subvariant of the coronavirus has suggested the pathogen could be changing how it attacks the human body - shifting from infecting respiratory systems to increasingly targeting the brain," the report said.

Researchers from Australia and France found BA.5 - the coronavirus subvariant driving what is now the world's biggest surge of infections in China - did much more severe damage to mouse brains and cultured human brain tissues than the previous BA.1 subvariant, leading to brain inflammation, weight loss and death, South China Morning Post reported.

The development comes in the backdrop of the highly transmissible Omicron strains, mostly BF.7, causing a spike in coronavirus cases in many countries, including China.

India has joined the United States, Japan, Italy and Taiwan in imposing mandatory COVID tests for travellers from China, amid a COVID-19 surge there after authorities relaxed strict ''zero-COVID'' rules.

It is unlikely that Covid will be completely eliminated but there seems little chance of a significant outbreak of the disease in India in the next two months.

China rolled back many of its tough pandemic restrictions earlier this month, allowing the virus to spread in a country that had seen relatively few infections since an initial devastating outbreak in the city of Wuhan in early 2020.

The spiralling of infections led to shortages of cold medicine, long lines at fever clinics, and emergency rooms turning away patients because they were at capacity. Cremations have risen several-fold, with a request from overburdened funeral homes in the city of Guangzhou for families to postpone funeral services until next month.

China has not reported this widely and blamed Western media for hyping up the situation. The government has been accused of controlling information about the outbreak since the start of the pandemic.