NEW DELHI — Health officials in India say cases of the coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa and Brazil have been found in India.
They said Tuesday that the variant was detected in four travelers last month. Over 150 cases of another variant first detected in the United Kingdom have previously been found in India.
Cases in India have been falling dramatically and uniformly across the country for months. But the detection of the more infectious variants comes amid some worrying but so far isolated outbreaks.
A cluster of over a 100 cases has been detected in the southern India city of Bengaluru at an apartment complex. Another spike was detected by health officials in several pockets of Maharashtra state, including in Mumbai, the country’s financial capital.
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THE VIRUS OUTBREAK:
— South African health care workers eagerly await Johnson & Johnson vaccine jabs
— Pandemic stresses take a huge toll on college students, who struggle to pay for food and housing as jobs and internships dry up
— U.S. hospitals still ration medical N95 masks even as stockpiles swell by millions
— Vaccine delays leave grocery workers feeling expendable
— India’s dramatic fall in virus cases leaves experts stumped
— Explaining the UN vaccine plan for poor countries as it nears rollout
— Follow all of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — El Salvador’s government says the Central American nation will receive its first shipment of coronavirus vaccine from India on Wednesday.
The office of President Nayib Bukele says the shipment of AstraZeneca vaccine will arrive on a flight from an Indian plant where it is produced.
Bukele’s office says the first doses will be used to vaccinate health care workers. The office did not say how many doses will be in the shipment, but says it will be used to vaccinate “thousands” of health care professionals.
The country has recorded about 58,000 coronavirus infections and 1,758 deaths from COVID-19 so far in the pandemic.
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MEXICO CITY — Mexico has topped 2 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 175,000 deaths, though officials concede that the country’s extremely low rate of testing means the real figures are much higher.
The Health Department said Tuesday that 8,683 more cases and 1,329 more deaths had been confirmed in the previous 24 hours.
Mexico’s 175,986 test-confirmed deaths so far is the third-highest toll in the world, behind the U.S. and Brazil. But estimates of the country’s excess deaths for 2020 suggest the real death toll from the pandemic is more than 220,000.
And excess death figures for January and early February — when the highest wave of cases came — have not yet been posted.
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SEOUL, South…