India reported five new cases of mutated coronavirus disease on Thursday, pushing the total cases to 25, the Ministry of Health said.
The National Institute of Virology in Pune and the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in Delhi have traced four out of the five new cases. The infected individuals at state health facilities have been held in physical isolation.
A total of 25 cases of United Kingdom mutant virus were found in India following genome sequencing. Four new cases in NIV, Pune, and one new case in IGIB, Delhi, were sequenced. All 25 individuals are in physical isolation at health facilities, said the health ministry official.
On Wednesday, India identified 14 new cases, eight of which were detected at the National Center for Disease Control (NCDC) in Delhi, four at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience Hospital (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru, and one each at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) in Delhi and the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBG) in Kalya, West Bengal.
Six individuals who returned from the UK on Tuesday, three from Karnataka and one each from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh, were found to be carrying the new form.
In designated health care facilities, those detected with the mutant strain are kept in single-room isolation by governments. Their close connections are often placed in quarantine, even though, according to the government, extensive contact tracing has been initiated for co-travelers, family contacts, and others.
The new variant of the virus detected in Britain has caused widespread concern around the world and travel restrictions.
According to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his board of scientific advisors, the coronavirus variant, which could be up to 70 per cent more transmissible, is spreading rapidly in Britain, although it is not thought to be more deadly or to cause more serious illness.
From November 25 to December 23, about 33,000 passengers arrived from the United Kingdom at various Indian airports, according to government statistics. Authorities have begun to monitor these passengers in batches for the gold-standard RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) test, but monitoring all of them is becoming a difficult task with hundreds of vague addresses being furnished and their phones turned off.
