From vaccination rate to COVID pills: Centre on Omicron spread- 10 points

New Delhi: NITI Ayog member Dr VK Paul and Health Secretary Lav Agarwal on Friday (December 17) discussed the COVID-19 pandemic situation in the country amid Omicron fears and said that unnecessary travelling and mass gatherings must be avoided for now.

The health expert also informed that the country now has 101 Omicron cases across 11 states and said that according to WHO, the variant is likely to outpace the Delta variant where community transmission occurs.

Here’s a 10 point cheat sheet to NITI Ayog’s press conference on the Omicron threat in India.

• New daily cases were recorded below 10,000 for the past 20 days. The case positivity for the last 1 week was 0.65%.
• India is administering COVID19 vaccine doses at the highest rate in the world and the daily rate of doses administered is 4.8 times the rate of doses administered in the USA and 12.5 times the rate of doses administered in the UK.
• Omicron variant reported in 91 countries in the world
• There are 101 Omicron cases across 11 states in the country
• This is the time to avoid non-essential travel, mass gatherings and it is very important to observe low-intensity festivities.
• Districts with over 5% Covid case positivity rate need to ensure restrictive measures until it's below 5% for at least 2 weeks.
• A new phase of the COVID19 pandemic is being experienced in Europe.
• Scientific data is still not supported in a big way that the anti-COVID-19 pills will be useful at the moment.
• No evidence to suggest that vaccines are not effective against the Omicron variant of coronavirus.
• Sufficient systematic and strategic sampling is being undertaken for genome sequencing for the detection of Omicron cases in India.

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