Hyderabad: At least 279 passengers recently returned from the UK to Telangana are untraceable, state health officials said, while 59 new cases recorded taking the number of newly caught infections in passengers back from Britain rose to 119 in India since last Sunday. Samples taken from all the virus-positive passengers have been sent to labs for sequencing and soon it will be known whether they are carrying the more transmissible variant currently ravaging the UK.
There were three new cases in Telangana, taking the state’s UK infected number to 21. Goa reported 16 cases among passengers from the UK, while there were 14 new cases from Maharashtra (total 17). One more passenger tested positive in Nashik, but it was unclear if he had contracted the novel coronavirus in the UK because he had tested negative at Mumbai airport on returning on December 13.
Kerala reported three new infected passengers, taking the total to eight, and Uttar Pradesh saw eight UK returnees test positive. One passenger from Mysuru in Karnataka was found to have the virus, while Andhra Pradesh reported six virus-positive cases.
India confirms six cases of new Covid variant
Meanwhile, according to reports, six cases of the more contagious variant of Covid-19 first identified in the UK have been confirmed in India. The six individuals who returned from the UK are being kept in isolation, officials said. India joined a list of other countries last week in suspending flights to and from the UK. The new variant is considerably more transmissible than previous strains but not necessarily any more dangerous, experts say.
Officials in India have begun contact-tracing close contacts and family members of the six who have tested positive for the new variant. Passengers arriving from the UK will undergo RT-PCR tests at all airports in the country, an official statement said. The samples found to be positive will then be genome sequenced by government-run labs in order to detect the new variant.
Around 33,000 passengers arrived in India from the UK over the past month. Of those, 114 were found to be positive for coronavirus - their samples have been sent to ten labs for genome sequencing, according to the statement. News of the new variant triggered travel restrictions around the world last week.
