The Uttar Pradesh government has issued alert after a case of new coronavirus strain, recently found in the United Kingdom, was detected in a two-year-old girl, according to Hindustan Times’ sister publication Hindustan.
The state health department has directed its officials and hospital staff to exercise extra caution; the hospitals too have been asked to be on high alert, Hindustan reported.
The UP health authorities have also ordered that people who have returned from abroad should be told to remain in home quarantine for 28 days, even if their RT-PCR report comes negative. Those found carrying the new strain of the coronavirus must be kept in separate isolation ward, the advisory from state health department further said.
Hindustan further reported that as many as 565 people who returned from the UK to Uttar Pradesh after December 9 have not been traced. Five people were found on Wednesday, and their samples sent to CSIR, Delhi.
According to state authorities, the mobile phones of those who came back from the UK are switched off, making it difficult to trace them, Hindustan reported.
Meanwhile, 14 more people tested positive for the new UK variant of Sars-CoV-2 virus, the Union ministry of health and family welfare announced on Wednesday. The ministry said this based on the results of genome sequencing of positive samples released by the Indian Sars-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (Insacog) labs.
The samples have so far been sequenced in seven of the 10 designated labs across the country—seven samples tested positive in NIMHANS, Bengaluru, two in CCMB, Hyderabad and one in NIV, Pune, eight in NCDC, Delhi, one in IGIB, Delhi and one in NIBG, Kalyani (West Bengal).
With this, the total number of people testing positive for the new UK variant of Covid-19 has reached 20.
Six cases of the new strain were detected on Tuesday, prompting the government to direct 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.
