India Reports 20 Cases Of COVID-19 Mutant Strain From UK

India reported twenty cases of the B.1.1.7 COVID- 19 mutation found in the UK in passengers who returned from the UK to the country before the suspension of air travel. Over 107 samples were sequenced across ten laboratories in the country.

The country suspended air travel with the United Kingdom from December 23 and enforced guidelines for mandatory testing and tracing of passengers who arrived from the country in the past thirty days.

This strain that is considered to be more infectious has mutations in the Spike protein. This mutation assists virus to bind faster to the human ACE2 receptor.

Along with mandatory testing, India also decided to subject samples that tested positive to genomic sequencing. This was undertaken to find if the UK variant was prevalent across the country.

From the twenty samples that tested positive for the variant, eight were sequenced at National Center of Disease Control in Delhi, seven at National Institute of Mental Health And Neuro Sciences in Bangalore, two at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, and one each at the National Institute of Virology, Pune, National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kolkata, and at Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi.

A Maharashtra state government official clarified that the sample sequenced at NIV, Pune was not of any passenger from Maharashtra. He highlighted that this sample was sent to NIV from Chennai.

At a time when the daily active case load is decreasing, to ensure that this new variant does not dent India's fight against COVID-19, the country has two task forces set in place which has set operational guidelines to tackle the outbreak.

Around ten laboratories across the country are a part of the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomic Consortium which will conduct the genomic sequencing of all the samples that test positive and have arrived from the UK.

(Update: The story has been updated with the latest figures provided by the Ministry)