After the US and Europe, a new variant of omicron BQ.1 has now been detected in Pune city of India's Maharashtra state.
The BQ.1 is a descendant of BA.5, which is behind 60 percent of COVID cases in the US.
Just a day before, another case of subvariant of the omicron variant BF.7 - also known as the 'omicron spawn' which was first detected in China and spread across the US, UK, Australia, and Belgium - was also confirmed in India's Gujarat state.
Another sub-variant XBB - a combination of two omicron sub-lineages BA.2.75 and BJ.1, and accounting for 54 percent of the local cases in Singapore - is also on the rise in India, causing 20 to 30 percent of infections reported in Maharashtra.
Amid the rise in new subvariants of Omicron, Indian scientists, working behind genome sequencing in India, told local media that the BA.2.75 sublineage of omicron's BA.2 variant continues to dominate the country with almost 98 percent of cases.
With the detection of yet another new subvariant BQ.1 detected in the latest genome sequencing conducted in October, scientists have raised an alarm and said that the subvariants have the potential to cause surges and hence, should not be ignored.
"These are all next-generation strains, or offspring, of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. Since omicron's emergence in January this year, we have not seen a completely new variant of the virus. However, these sub-variants, called sublineages, also have the potential to cause surges, so they should not be ignored," a scientist from the National Institute of Virology (NIV) told daily newspaper, the Times of India.
As the cases of COVID variants rise, experts have called for close genomic surveillance both from patient samples (outpatients and inpatients) and wastewater to assess the evolution of the new omicron sublineages.
Indian scientists continue sequencing samples in three big labs in Maharashtra, Gujarat, and West Bengal states to identify newer variants.