Worldwide, new official daily cases (7-day averages) have been rising for two months now, from around 350,000/day to about 815,000/day at present. About two-thirds of the growth has been the explosion in India. On April 28, India set yet another record, with 379,000 daily new cases recorded. The positivity rate of 20% is a strong indicator that many cases are not being discovered. In fact, serum sampling indicates that only 4-5% of the actual cases are being discovered. So, while most of the cases that need hospitalization are being discovered, there are indications of a vast reservoir of the coronavirus in the population, creating a vast “Petri dish” for breeding new variants.
It is important to recall that India’s “double mutant” variant — which is, in one sampling, now showing up in 38% of India’s cases — includes a “California” variant’s mutations. This suggests that the outbreak in late December and early January in Los Angeles County likely had a role in what hit India this March. So, what is hitting India now, while deadly in the present, raises the issue of what will arise out of the stew of mutations going on at a large and rapid rate there, and where it will emerge a month or two from now. Unless the world learns how to fight these infection fires at a higher level than the coronavirus or any particular variant, it is a deadly and ongoing game of whack-a-mole.
