As many as 178 people in India have tested positive for coronavirus variant that emerged in the United Kingdom last year, but not a single death has been attributed to the UK mutation so far.
“At present, the country doesn’t have any cases of the Brazilian or South African variants. If and when in genome sequencing we are able to detect one of these variants, we will start tracking them. And, as far as the 178 cases of the UK mutant are concerned, there have been no deaths,” a source at the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare told News18.
Meanwhile, the Government of India is monitoring reports of the UK variant and has put in place a preventive and proactive strategy to detect and contain the mutation. Comprehensive contact tracing of co-travellers and family contacts of those who have been detected with the UK variant continues.
The UK Variant of SARS-CoV-2 was detected in samples of over 40 people at the National Centre for Disease Control, 51 patients at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in New Delhi, 44 in the National Institute of Virology in Pune, five in the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, eight in the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, 14 in National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences Hospital in Bengaluru and one in the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in Kalyani.
The UK variant has been reported in several other countries, including Italy, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Japan, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore and Lebanon.
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