We are off on Friday, March 18, in view of Holi in India, and thus there will not be a Corona Letter edition tomorrow. The newsletter will resume Sunday, March 20.

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• India on Thursday reported 2,539 Covid cases and 60 fatalities. The cumulative caseload is 43,001,477 (30,799 active cases) and 516,132 fatalities.
• Worldwide: Over 463 million cases and over 6.05 million fatalities.
• Vaccination in India: Over 1.80 billion doses. Worldwide: Over 10.7 billion doses.

• Though the omicron variant has been milder than its predecessors — and possibly its successors — new research throws light on a hitherto unrecognised complication associated with this strain: Croup.
• What is it: Croup, also known as laryngotracheitis, is a common respiratory illness in babies and young children. It happens when colds and other viral infections cause inflammation and swelling around the voice box, windpipe, and bronchial tubes.
• The symptoms: The illness is marked by a distinctive barking cough and sometimes noisy, high-pitched intakes of breath known as stridor. In severe cases, croup can dangerously constrict breathing.
• The sample base: The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, analyses 75 children who came to the Boston Children’s Hospital emergency department (ED) with croup and Covid-19 between March 1, 2020, and January 15, 2022. Most of the children were under age 2, and 72% were boys.
• The findings: Nine among these children or 12% needed to be hospitalised, including four kids needing intensive care, the researchers said. Thankfully, there were no fatalities. In comparison, pre-pandemic, fewer than 5% of children with croup needed to be hospitalised, and of those, only 1-3 % required intubation, they added.
• All of those who were hospitalised received treatment which is reserved for moderate or severe cases. Overall, 97% of the children were treated with dexamethasone, a steroid.
• The relatively high hospitalisation rate and the large number of medication doses needed by the croup patients suggests that Covid-19 may cause more severe croup compared to other viruses.

• The World Health Organisation (WHO) has sounded the alarm over a global spike in Covid-19 cases, despite reduced testing and several weeks of declining infections.
• Western Europe has seen a surge in caseloads in recent times — Germany is even calling the situation critical — and this has put US health authorities on alert for a new wave.
• China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, South Korea are among the South East Asian countries witnessing a rise in Covid-19 cases. Blame it all on omicron’s sublineage BA.2, which appears to be more transmissible than the original strain, BA.1, and is fuelling this outbreak, as well as worldwide trend towards relaxing Covid protocols.
• According to Maria van Kerkhove, WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, more than 11 million cases have been reported to the UN body in the last week. This is an 8% increase over the preceding week.
• WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press briefing that globally increasing cases despite reduced testing “means the cases we are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg”.
• Keep in mind that the pandemic is neither over, nor has it “settled down into a purely, seasonal or predictable pattern”, as Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, put it.