Mumbai: A 50-year-old fully vaccinated female, with a travel history to South Africa in February, has been identified as the first case of the new Covid-19 variant XE.
As per the information provided by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the patient, a costume designer who was a member of a shooting crew, arrived from South Africa on February 10.
A case of the Kappa variant was also detected during a sero survey, a civic health official said, adding the results came in genome sequencing of 376 samples, the 11th batch of testing in the local genome sequencing lab.
The condition of the patients infected with the new strains of the virus was not serious, the official said.
It is believed that the XE variant is 10 per cent more transmissible than the other Omicron mutations.
The woman, on arrival in Mumbai, was asymptomatic and had tested negative for Covid-19. "But on March 2, in a routine testing, conducted by Suburban Diagnostics, she was found positive and was quarantined in a hotel room," a BMC statement read. Within 24 hours, she turned negative on her next day's test.
Later, the BMC in its eleventh batch of genome sequencing at the civic-run Kasturba Hospital, detected her with the new variant — XE subtype. A total of 230 samples were sequenced, of which 228 samples were identified with Omicron. Speaking on the development, Covid-19 task force member Dr Shashank Joshi assured that there is no need to panic. "As it is a mutation of Omicron, which doesn't involve lungs, it is believed that the XE variant will not cause severe infection. But there is a need to use masks, especially at crowded places," he said.
Mumbai on Tuesday reported 56 Covid cases, which is a three-fold rise from the addition to the tally a day earlier, taking the infection count here to 10,58,185, an official said. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had earlier said the new subvariant – 'XE' – a hybrid strain of two Omicron sub-variants, could be the most transmissible Coronavirus strain so far.
According to the global health body, early studies indicated the variant had a growth rate advantage of 10 per cent as compared to BA.2, one of the very contagious variants.
A study in the UK, which is facing a fresh wave of infections, suggested that while there were signs of "community transmission" of XE in England, it remained less than one per cent of the totally sequenced Coronavirus cases. With 1,086 new Coronavirus infections being reported in a single day, India's total tally of Covid cases rose to 4,30,30,925 while the active cases dipped to 11,871, according to the Union Health ministry data updated on Wednesday.
The death toll climbed to 5,21,487 with 71 fresh fatalities, the data updated at 8 am stated. The active cases comprise 0.03 per cent of the total infections, while the national Covid recovery rate remained at 98.76 per cent, the ministry said.
A reduction of 183 cases has been recorded in the active Covid caseload in a span of 24 hours.
The daily positivity rate was recorded as 0.23 per cent and the weekly positivity rate as 0.22 per cent, according to the ministry.
The number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 4,24,97,567, while the case fatality rate was 1.21 per cent.