India Reports Third Case Of Omicron

JAKARTA - India reported its third case of Omicron's COVID-19 on Saturday as the total number of COVID-19 cases nearly reached 35 million, government officials said.

Officials in the western state of Gujarat said the patient was a 72-year-old Indian man who had lived in Zimbabwe for decades and returned home on November 28.

India recorded 8,603 new cases on Saturday, bringing the total to 34.62 million cases. Deaths also rose by 415 to 470,530 deaths.

Prime Minister Narendara Modi last November asked officials to focus on countries known to be at risk, after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Omicron a variant of "to watch out for".

The WHO says Omicron, which was first detected in South Africa, is likely to spread more quickly than other variants.

India estimates the Omicron variant does not cause more severe disease, due to high vaccination rates and exposure to the previous Delta variant that infected nearly 70 percent of the population in July.

The federal health ministry said on Thursday that India had identified two male patients with Omicron COVID-19, aged 66 and 46, in the state of Karnataka.

The first man is a native of South Africa and the other is a doctor with no recent travel history.

India saw a spike in infections and deaths from the Delta variant in April and May.

Authorities have only vaccinated half of the 944 million adults completely despite having a sufficient supply of homemade vaccines.