Odisha’s First Delta Plus Case From Deogarh; Are Vaccines Effective Against This Variant?

Bhubaneswar: One case of Delta Plus variant of coronavirus has been detected in Odisha and the infected is from Deogarh district, the Health Department sources said.

The variant’s tag was elevated from ‘Variant of Interest’ to ‘Variant of Concern’ recently and is feared ahead of a potential third wave.

Director of Medical Education & Training (DMET) CBK Mohanty told a regional news channel that the local administration will check travel history and conduct contact tracing of the patient infected with the variant of this virus. “The COVID guidelines apply to all types of variants of COVID. Vaccines will check the severity of disease,” he added.

The Health Ministry recently said that both Covaxin and Covishield are effective against the Delta variant. “But to what extent and what is the proportion of antibody titers produced by these vaccines will be shared soon,” Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan said.

SputnikV, the other vaccine that will soon be available in India, is also said to be effective against this variant. “Antibodies developed after vaccination with SputnikV protect from all variants of COVID known today, starting from the UK variant to the so-called Delta variant, first detected in India,” said Head of the Gamaleya Center academician Alexander Gintsburg.

The case in Odisha is among the 48 detected from 11 states in India through genome sequencing of 45,000 samples.

Eight states – Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Telangana and West Bengal – have reported more than 50 per cent of the variant of concern (Delta variant), National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) Director Dr SK Singh informed on Friday.