NEW DELHI (Reuters), India has begun administering COVID-19 booster doses to frontline workers, vulnerable seniors and other people. Since the beginning of the year, the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is rapidly spreading. This has led to an 8-fold increase in daily infection rates since then.

India recorded 179,723 cases of new infections on Monday. Most of these were in India’s largest cities, Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata. Omicron is now the predominant strain.

On Monday there were 146 reported deaths, making the total to 483,936 for the Indian pandemic that began in the early 2020s. There have been more deaths in Brazil than the United States.

In the last few days, hundreds have been diagnosed with the disease by healthcare professionals and police. There were also media reports that hundreds more parliamentary staff had tested positive in advance of the Feb. 1 session of budget.

Faced with this third and increasing wave of infections the government issued booster reminders to over 10 million people who had taken their Covaxin/Covishield shots nine months prior.

India, unlike many other countries, does not mix and match vaccines.

This “precaution dose” can only be given to front-line workers, healthcare professionals and individuals over 60 with other conditions.

Mansukh Mandaviya, the Health Minister of India wrote that “The government will provide additional security protection to healthcare services and frontline workers in priority.”

Five states, including Uttar Pradesh, which is the most populous state in India will be holding elections beginning February 10, despite the rising number of infections. However authorities have banned political parties from gatherings starting at the end of the month.

India has nearly 1.4 million people. The government administered 1.5 billion vaccination doses. 67% of India’s 939,000,000 adults were double-vaccinated.

India’s COVID-19-testing has been at around 1.5million per day. That is far below its maximum capacity of over 2 million.

India is home to the most COVID-19 cases in the world, with 35.7 million of them since 2001, when the pandemic started.

Officials in government have said that they believe daily infection rates will exceed the May record of 414,000, which was based on the experience in the United States. Daily cases in the United States have increased by more than 1 million per day.