India may see Covid surge within days, says Cambridge University's tracker

. The country is already gearing up to prevent another massive outbreak even though only 781 cases of the highly-mutated omicron have been identified so far.

India may see a spurt in the Covid-19 growth rate within days and head into an intense but short-lived virus wave as the highly-infectious omicron variant moves through the crowded nation of almost 1.4 billion.

“It is likely that India will see a period of explosive growth in daily cases and that the intense growth phase will be relatively short,” Paul Kattuman, professor at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge which has developed a Covid-19 India tracker, wrote in an email. “New infections will begin to rise in a few days, possibly within this week,” he said, adding