Mutant strain COVID-19 tally reaches 165 in India, says the Health Ministry

New Delhi, The number of people who have tested positive for the UK variant of SARS-CoV-2 in the country has climbed to 165, the Union Health Ministry said on Thursday. All these persons have been kept in single room isolation in designated Health Care facilities by respective state governments.

Their close contacts have also been put under quarantine. Comprehensive contact tracing has been initiated for co-travellers, family contacts and others.

"The total number of cases infected with the new strain of the novel coronavirus first reported in the UK now stands at 165," the ministry said.

Of the total 165 cases, the mutated UK strain was detected in the samples of 42 people at National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in New Delhi and 51 in the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) in Delhi, five in the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, 44 in the National Institute of Virology in Pune, eight in the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, 14 in National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences Hospital (NIMHANS) Bengaluru and one in the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBMG), Kalyani (near Kolkata).

The presence of the new UK variant has already been reported by several countries, including Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Japan, Lebanon and Singapore.

The Government of India took cognizance of the reports of virus reported from the UK and put in place a proactive and preventive strategy to detect and contain the mutant variant.



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