New Delhi: Fourteen more people were found infected in India with the UK strain of the coronavirus Wednesday. West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh reported such cases for the first time, taking the total tally to 20 in two days.
A cautious government extended the temporary suspension of passenger flights between the UK and India for a week till January 7. It said the services would resume in a ‘strictly regulated’ manner thereafter.
According to local authorities, a number of UK returnees in states like Maharashtra, Odisha, Karnataka and Punjab remained untraceable. Efforts were on to contact them.
The Centre had last week directed that about 33,000 passengers who had arrived in India from November 25 to December 23 midnight, will be tracked and subjected to RT-PCR tests along with their contacts by states and Union Territories. It had said the positive samples will be sent for genome sequencing.
To detect cases of the new strain, the government has now directed genome sequencing of samples from all passengers who arrived in India from December 9 to 22 and tested positive for COVID-19 or were symptomatic as it ramped up the surveillance and containment strategy.
Experts have maintained that so far it has not been found that the new strain increases the severity of the disease, though it is considerably more transmissible.
At least six cases of the new strain were reported Wednesday. Among the new cases, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh reported one and two respectively among the UK returnees, according to state authorities.
The Union Health Ministry said the mutated UK strain has so far been detected in eight samples at the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in Delhi.
Official sources said among the eight people there was the woman who left Delhi and travelled to Andhra Pradesh last week by train. The remaining seven are in quarantine at the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital (LNJP) in the national capital.
Tests of those returning from the United Kingdom after December 9 are continuing and till now around 2,500 samples have been sent to the labs, said an UP health ministry official. He added that so far 10 people have tested positive.
In West Bengal, a senior health official said that son of a senior official of the state Health Department, tested positive for the mutant coronavirus strain after returning from London 10 days ago.
“The youth is undergoing treatment at the Calcutta Medical College and Hospital’s super-specialty section. He is under observation. We have advised all those who have come in contact with him to isolate themselves,” the official told PTI.
Six others had come in contact with the youth at the airport. They also underwent genetic analysis but tested negative for the new COVID-19 strain, he said. The youth, however, was not having ‘serious health issues’ and was ‘quite okay’ at the moment, the official added.