20 New Cases Of New Covid-19 Strain Found In India, Total Tally At 58

The Ministry said that it is monitoring the situation closely and giving regular advice to the states for enhanced surveillance, containment, testing, and dispatch of samples to labs.

MUMBAI, INDIA - DECEMBER 22: India health workers in personal protective equipment (PPE) guide passengers arriving from United Kingdom, at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai, India on December 22, 2020. Dozens of countries around the world slapped tough travel restrictions on the U.K. because of a new and seemingly more contagious strain of the coronavirus in England. From Canada to India, one nation after another banned flights from Britain. (Photo by Imtiyaz Shaikh/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The Union Health Ministry on Tuesday said that 20 more cases of the mutant strain of coronavirus reported from the UK have been detected in India, which now makes 58 total cases of the new strain in the country. "All these persons have been kept in single-room isolation in designated healthcare facilities by the respective state governments. Their close contacts have also been put in quarantine. Comprehensive contact tracing has been initiated for co-travelers, family contacts and others. Genome sequencing on other specimens is going on," the Health Ministry said. READ | How Covid-19 Vaccine Gets Approval In India? Of the total cases in the country, eight have been registered at the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), 11 at CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), (both in Delhi), and 10 at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru. Three such cases have been detected at Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, one at National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in West Bengal, and 25 at National Institute of Virology, Pune. Six UK returnees were found positive for the new coronavirus variant on December 29 and these became the first cases to be reported in India, which has the second-highest number of coronavirus cases after the United States. The tracing and testing were initiated after the British government announced that a newly identified strain of the virus which is up to 70 per cent more transmissible was found in the UK population. Notably, the UK strain has already been reported by Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Japan, Lebanon, and Singapore. The Ministry said that it is monitoring the situation closely and giving regular advice to the states for enhanced surveillance, containment, testing, and dispatch of samples to labs.