The Ministry of Health and Social Protection of Tajikistan (MoHSPP) says no cases of the coronavirus Delta variant have been registered in Tajikistan. The health authorities assure that in case of detection of the Delta variant in the country, this will be officially announced.
Meanwhile, health workers working in a “red zone” note that the symptoms of the patients have changed, and this perhaps points to the Delta variant.
The number of those contracting COVID-19 is increasing in Tajikistan, and cases of covid infection have already been reported even among infants in hospitals. Doctors suggest that the possible reason for this is the spread of the Delta variant in the country.
“”I think the covid Delta variant has already spread in Tajikistan,” the infectious disease physician Mamlakat Tursunova told Asia-Plus in an interview.
According to her, there is already a case of a child contracting coronavirus in her practice.
“Two weeks ago, there was a woman with coronavirus in my ward and her daughter-in-law with a six-month-old baby girl have been admitted to our hospital just recently. All of them have tested positive for COVID-19,” the physician noted.
The health authorities, however, deny information about the spread of the Delta variant in Tajikistan as unfounded.
The MoHSPP press center says “the labs send PCR test results to the ministry every day and no cases of the Indian strain have been detected.”
Navrouz Jafarov, the head of the Directorate for Epidemiological Safety, says, “We treat COVID-19 and that's it, while dealing with strains is the task of laboratories.”
Delta is the name for the B.1.617.2. variant, a SARS-CoV-2 mutation that originally surfaced in India. The first Delta case was identified in December 2020, and the strain spread rapidly, soon becoming the dominant strain of the virus in both India and then Great Britain.
The World Health Organization (WHO) named it the Delta variant on 31 May 2021.
Public Health England (PHE) in May 2021 observed secondary attack rates to be 51–67% higher than the alpha variant.
On May 11, 2021, the WHO also classified this lineage VOC, and said that it showed evidence of higher transmissibility and reduced neutralization. The variant is thought to be partly responsible for India's second wave of the pandemic beginning in February 2021. It later contributed to a third wave in Fiji, the United Kingdom and South Africa, and the WHO warned in July 2021 it could have a similar effect elsewhere in Europe and Africa.
On June 7, 2021, researchers at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases in Singapore posted a paper suggesting that patients testing positive for Delta are more likely to develop pneumonia and/or require oxygen than patients with wild type or Alpha. On June 15, 2021, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention declared Delta a variant of concern.
