In a recent study, the ICMR has said that more than half of the children in India contracted the Delta variant during the second wave.
The third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has seemingly arrived in India, with several states reporting a high surge of cases over the past few weeks. Amid this, the vaccination drive for teenagers across the country is advancing at a rapid pace.
Now, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), in the latest study has said that more than half of the children in the country were infected with the Delta variant during the second wave of the pandemic, which saw a heightened number of deaths in the country.
The ICMR study was conducted from March 2020 to June 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak. A total of eight states in India were included in this study, which was Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, and Andhra Pradesh.
Children up to the age of 18 were included in the study and as many as 583 samples were collected. Of these, 52 percent were between the ages of 13 and 19, 41 percent were between the ages of 3 and 12 and 7 percent were under the age of 3 years.
Of the total 583 children, 37 percent were such children who were found to have symptoms of coronavirus, out of which 15 percent of children needed to go to the hospital. It must be noted that all of these children were COVID-19 positive.
Out of the total 583 samples collected by ICMR, 512 samples were sent for genome sequencing. Out of these, 372 samples were positive for variants of concern, while 51 samples found variants of interest, 89 samples also found other variants.
Out of these, more than 66 percent of the children were tested positive for the Delta variant of COVID-19. About 9 percent tested positive for the kappa variant, 7 percent for the alpha variant and 5 percent tested positive for the beta variant.
The ICMR study shows that the Delta variant was found more in Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Telangana, while the kappa variant was found in the samples of children from Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Chandigarh.
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 "Over 50% children got infected with Delta variant during COVID-19 second wave: ICMR")
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