"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.
ALSO READ | Vaccine War Simmers Down; Serum Institute, Bharat Biotech Jointly Pledge Smooth Covid Vaccine Roll-Out
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.