India records 13,216 new Covid-19 cases; daily positivity rate at 2.73%
Coronavirus News Live Updates: India recorded 13,216 new coronavirus cases and 23 deaths in the last 24 hours, according to data released by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The number of active cases has risen to 68,108, while the daily positivity rate is 2.73%. Vaccinated patients with Omicron BA.1 breakthrough infections developed antibodies that could neutralise that virus plus the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, but the Omicron sublineages circulating now have mutations that allow them to evade those antibodies, researchers from China reported on Friday in Nature. Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, a microbiology and infectious diseases researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, suggested that better protection might be seen with vaccines that target multiple strains of the virus or with intranasal vaccines that would increase protection from infection and transmission by generating immunity in the lining of the nose, where the virus first enters.
People infected with the earliest version of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, first identified in South Africa in November, may be vulnerable to reinfection with later versions of Omicron even if they have been vaccinated and boosted, new findings suggest.
