Representational Image, source: IANS
New Delhi : Fourteen more cases of new coronavirus variant first identified in UK have been confirmed in India, taking its total cases to 20 Wednesday.
Reports say eight have been registered at National Centre for Disease Control in Delhi, 7 at National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences in Bangalore, two at Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad.
One each has been logged at National Institute of Biomedical Genomics near Kolkata, National Institute of Virology in Pune and CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in Delhi.
A total of 107 samples have undergone genome sequencing till now.
A two-year-old girl in Meerut is kept in isolation having tested positive for the new strain. Her parents, also tested positive for the mutant, are at Meerut's Subharti Medical College. They had all returned from the UK, the health officials in Meerut said.
On Tuesday, six UK returnees became first in the nation to be positive with new variant genome, and have since been kept in isolation, the central government earlier announced.
The British government had earlier found a newly identified strain of the virus as up to 70 per cent more transmissible.
This new variant has already been reported by Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Japan, Lebanon and Singapore.
India quickly joined a list of nations halting flights to and from UK, as well as imposing strict checks at airports reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic.
Between November 25 and December 23 midnight, 33,000 passengers arrived in Indian airports from the UK. Authorities from Central and state governments tracked and subjected the passengers to RT-PCR tests.
IANS report with edits