Data shows India's changing Covid-19 mix as share of omicron samples dips

Govt stopped updating weekly numbers on genetic sequencing in January

Information submitted to GISAID, a global initiative for sharing genomic data accessed through numbers made available on their website and other trackers collating the numbers, shows a dropping share of Covid-19 samples which can be definitively identified as the Omicron variant.

Omicron accounted for around 97 per cent of samples tested on February 7. This has since dropped to around 88 per cent as of March 7. The share of 'others' or samples which cannot be classified under any one variant rose to 12 per cent from around 2 per cent earlier (see chart 1). The government’s initiative for monitoring