Union health secretary writes to all States to ensure that all positive cases of SARS- COV 2 variants are sent to Genome Sequencing Laboratories of INSACOG !

The government of India has gone on alert mode after the Covid 19 pandemic witnesses spike in cases in countries like China, Japan, United States of America, Brazil and Korea. Though India is currently on comfortable mode in terms of the pandemic spread with negligible 3940 active cases at the pan India level that comes to merely 0.01% infection with 98.80 % patients discharged. There have been 2, 20,00,92,109 vaccination at the national level till date. Meanwhile the Secretary of Ministry of health and family Welfare Mr. Shashi Bhushan, IAS has issued directives to secretary DBT, secretary ( DHR) and DG Indian Council of Medical Research, Director General Health Services and Director NCDC including additional chief secretary/ principal secretary/ n secretaries health of all the states and union territories requesting to ensure that samples of all positive cases of new SARS – COV 2 variants are sent to the designated INSACOG GENOME Sequencing Laboratories that are mapped to the states and union territories. The central health ministry while lauding the efforts of state governments to control the pandemic has assured of all possible support and cooperation in this regard. In a letter sent by the secretary Health and Family Welfare Rajesh Bhushan to all a States etc it sad that the Operational Guidelines for revised Surveillance Strategy in the context of Covid 19 issued by the Health ministry in June 22 calls for an early detection, isolation, testing, and timely management of suspected and confirmed cases to detect and contain of new SARS-COV-2 variants. Therefore monitoring the trends of existing variants is of crucial importance it added. The letter mentions that in view of the sudden spurt of cases being witnessed in Japan, United States, China, Korea and Brazil it is important and essential to gear up the whole genome sequencing of positive case samples to track the variants through Indian SARS COV-2, Genomic Consortium network. It added that such an exercise will enable timely detection of newer variants. Mr Rajesh Bhushan said that this exercise will fecilitate undertaking of requisite public health measures required essentially n inevitably, in this context.