India on Thursday recorded five new cases of mutated coronavirus disease pushing the total cases count to 25, the health ministry said.
Out of the five fresh cases, four have been traced by National Institute of Virology in Pune and CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in Delhi. The infected individuals have been kept in physical isolation at state health facilities.
“A total of 25 cases of mutant United Kingdom virus detected in India after genome sequencing. Four new cases found by NIV, Pune and one new case sequenced in IGIB, Delhi. All 25 persons are in physical isolation at health facilities,” the health ministry official said, reported news agency ANI.
India had detected 14 new cases on Wednesday, out of which eight were detected at the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in Delhi, four at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences 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 West Bengal’s Kalyani.
On Tuesday, six people — three from Karnataka and one each from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh — who returned from the UK were found to be carrying the new variant.
Those detected with the mutant strain are being kept in single-room isolation in designated health care facilities by states. Their close contacts are also being put in quarantine even as comprehensive contact-tracing has been initiated for co-travellers, family contacts and others, according to the government.
The new variant of the virus detected in Britain has triggered widespread concern and travel restrictions across the world.
The variant of the coronavirus, which could be up to 70% more transmissible, is spreading rapidly in Britain, although it is not thought to be more deadly or to cause more serious illness, according to prime minister Boris Johnson and his board of scientific advisors.
About 33,000 passengers arrived from the UK at various Indian airports from November 25 to December 23, the government statistics stated. Authorities have begun conducting the gold-standard RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) test on these passengers in batches, though tracing all of them is becoming a difficult task with hundreds furnishing vague addresses and switching off their phones.