India has reported its highest daily coronavirus death toll, with 1,761 recorded overnight and large swathes of the country now under lockdown.
It comes as Professor Sir Mark Walport, former chief scientific adviser to the government, said the decision to put India on the red list was “taken a bit too late”.
He told BBC Breakfast that the variant of Covid-19 that first emerged in India and has been detected in the UK is “becoming the dominant variant” in India, adding that the mutation may mean the variant is “a bit more effective at escaping an immune response”.
Behind the headline review on the week in health
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Putting India on travel ‘red list’ was necessary due to ‘upward trend’ in UK variant cases, says expert
Professor Sharon Peacock, head of the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), has said that putting India on the “red list” was a necessary step due to an “upward trend” in UK variant cases.
Health secretary Matt Hancock told the Commons on Monday that 103 cases of the variant that first emerged…
