India Coronavirus Dispatch: Daily cases fall below 10,000

Young children show low sero prevalence in study, which mutations are more prevalent, a tool to ease mutation analysis-news relevant to India's fight against Covid-19

IN NUMBERS: Daily infections dip to 9,110

Some 9,110 new coronavirus infections were recorded in the past 24 hours nationwide, taking the cumulative caseload to 10,847,304, according to a report in the Scroll. Seventy eight deaths were reported, taking the total death toll to 155,158, according to central health ministry data updated on Monday. The total recoveries have surged to 10,548,521. The national recovery rate has climbed to 97.25 per cent. The active caseload has reduced to 143,625. About 6.2 million healthcare workers have been inoculated since the nationwide inoculation programme kicked off on January 16. Read more here

Young children may have low Covid infection rate: Lancet study

A French study has suggested that children in daycare centres aged between 5 months and 4 years are not spreading the virus widely in such settings, according to a report in ThePrint. The children who were included in the study attended 13 daycare centres across three French cities during lockdown from March to May 2020 and showed low infection rates. The study is the first to estimate seroprevalence in pre-school settings and the findings were published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. Read more here

Virus mutations can be "silent" or "non-silent": Expert

Amit Dutt, a scientist at the Advanced Centre for Treatment Research and Education in Cancer (ACTREC) at the Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai, explains what kind of mutations are more prevalent, in a report for The Indian Express. Dutt says mutations can be "silent" or "non-silent". The non-silent mutations are the ones where alterations in the genetic make-up of a virus could lead to a difference in the structure of function of the associated amino acids. Such mutations also offer selection advantage to the new variant, particularly when the mutation is forced in any particular direction due to external pressures, like vaccination. These non-silent mutations are meant to strengthen the mutant's ability to spread and are expected to be more prevalent. Read more here

‘Citizen science’ can help tackle the spread of misinformation

Ensuring that real-time and real information is disseminated during a pandemic plays a critical role in controlling the spread. To bridge the gap between scientific information and the public, 'citizen science' has emerged as a powerful tool, according to a report in ThePrint. To fight misinformation, a team of scientists and engineers have created a crowdsourced citizen science project called Covid19Kerala.info. The project is run by the Collective for Open Data Distribution-Keralam (CODD-K). CODD-K collects Covid-19 data in real-time, curates it, and makes it available to the public through a user-friendly dashboard. Read more here

Tool to ease novel coronavirus genome mutation analysis

A computational tool called Infectious Pathogen Detector (IPD), developed by the research and development wing of Mumbai's Tata Memorial Centre, to identify the presence of 1,060 different pathogens in any genome sequence sample and perform mutation analysis has become even more useful with the addition of a module for the novel coronavirus, according to a report in The Hindu. Read more here