About 40 bodies believed to be COVID-19 victims, have washed up on the banks of the Ganges river in northern India, officials said on Monday.
The pandemic has been spreading fast into India's vast rural hinterland, overwhelming local health facilities as well as crematoriums and cemeteries.
Local official Ashok Kumar said that about 40 corpses washed up in Buxar district near the border between Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, two of India's poorest states.
"We have directed concerned officials to dispose of all bodies, to either bury or cremate them," Kumar told AFP.
Some media reports said the number of corpses could be as high as 100.
The reports quoted other officials as saying some of them were bloated and partially burned and could have been in the river for several days.
Locals told AFP that they believed the bodies had been dumped in the river because cremation sites were overwhelmed or because relatives could not afford wood for funeral pyres.
"It is really shocking for us," local resident Kameshwar Pandey told AFP.
According to official statistics, around 4,000 people are currently dying from coronavirus every day in India and the death toll is almost 250,000.
But citing anecdotal evidence from crematoriums, many experts believe that the true daily number could be several times higher.
A health worker wearing a protective suit treating a patient inside a COVID-19 care center in India's New Delhi. Source: AAP
This is particularly the case now that the current surge has spread beyond major cities into rural areas where hospitals are few and far between and record-keeping poor.
Variant 'of global concern'
The COVID-19 variant spreading in India appears to be more contagious and has been classified as being "of concern", the World Health Organization said on Monday.
The UN health agency said the B.1.617 variant of COVID-19 first found in India last October seemed to be transmitting more easily.
"There is some available information to suggest increased transmissibility of the B.1.617," Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's lead on COVID-19, told reporters.
"As such, we are classifying this as a variant of concern at the global level," she said.
She also pointed to early studies "suggesting that there is some reduced neutralisation", meaning that antibodies appeared to have less impact on the variant in small-sample lab studies.
The WHO insisted though that it was far too early to interpret this to mean that the variant might have more resistance to vaccine protections.
"Based on current data, the COVID-19 vaccines remain effective at preventing disease and death in people infected with this variant," it said in a statement.
More details would be provided about the variant in the WHO's weekly epidemiological update on Tuesday, Dr Van Kerkhove said.
India, suffering from one of the worst outbreaks in the world, reported nearly 370,000 fresh infections and more than 3,700 new deaths on Monday.
The devastating wave has overwhelmed India's healthcare system, and experts have said the official figures for cases and fatalities are much lower than the actual numbers.
It has for some time been feared that B.1.617 - which counts several sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics - might be contributing to the alarming spread.
But until now, WHO has listed it merely as a "variant of interest".
'Balanced approach'
Now it will be added to the list containing three other variants of COVID-19, those first detected in Britain, Brazil and South Africa, which the WHO has classified as being "of concern".
They are seen as more dangerous than the original version of the virus by either being more transmissible, deadly or able to get past some vaccine protections.
Even if vaccine efficacy may be diminished against some variants of COVID-19, the jabs can still provide protection against serious illness and death.
And Dr Van Kerkhove stressed that when it comes to the B.1.617 variant, for the time being "we don't have anything to suggest that our diagnostics or therapeutics and our vaccines don't work".
The WHO's chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan agreed, urging a "balanced approach.
"What we know now is that the vaccines work, the diagnostics work, the same treatments that are used for the regular virus work," she told journalists.
"So there's really no need to change any of those, and in fact... people should go ahead and get whatever vaccine is available to them and that they are eligible for."
Experts highlight that the more the virus spreads, the bigger the risk it will find ideal conditions to mutate in concerning ways, stressing that everything must be done to rein in transmission.
"We will continue to see variants of concern around the world, and we must do everything that we can to really limit the spread," Dr Van Kerkhove said.
