No reason to worry about new Covid variant Kraken in India yet: Experts

US Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that from just 1 percent of the Covid19 cases in the US in Dec 2022, Kraken variant now accounts for almost 41 percent of all the Covid19 infections

Kraken — nickname for the XBB.1.5 SarsCoV-2 variant — is spreading fast across the globe and has already been detected in 29 countries. While the World Health Organisation (WHO) has expressed concern about the variant, experts in India see no reason for alarm yet. 

JP Muliyil, epidemiologist at CMC Vellore and member of the working group of the National Technical Advisory Group (NTAGI), said, “Truly there is no way we can guess the severity from communicability. For that, we need to see information on hospitalisation and case fatality. At present, the information suggests that this Omicron is very similar to