The first case of XE, a more transmissible Covid-19 variant, was detected in Mumbai on Wednesday, a civic health official said.
The patient, a 50-year-old woman, is fully vaccinated against the virus and has shown no symptoms so far, Mumbai's civic body BMC said. She also suffers from no comorbidities.
A costume designer by profession, she arrived from South Africa on February 10, 2022. On arrival in India, she tested negative for Covid-19 but on March 2, 2022, during routine testing, she was found to be positive, following which she was quarantined at the Taj Lands End in Mumbai’s suburban Bandra. However, the next day, her samples returned negative.
A case of the Kappa variant was also detected during a sero survey, the official said, adding the results came in genome sequencing of 376 samples, the 11th batch of testing in the local genome sequencing lab.
As per the survey, Omicron variant was found in 228 out of 230 samples (99.13 per cent cases) from Mumbai, he said.
The genome sequencing of 376 samples was conducted at the municipal Kasturba Hospital's Genome Sequencing Lab.
The condition of the patients infected with the new strains of the virus was not serious, the official said.
Mumbai on Tuesday reported 56 Covid-19 cases, which is a three-fold rise from the addition to the tally a day earlier, taking the infection count here 10,58,185, a civic official said.
The death toll remained unchanged at 19,559, while the recovery count rose by 36 to touch 10,38,356, leaving the metropolis with 270 active cases.
The official said the XE mutant appears to be 10 per cent more transmissible than the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron. So far, BA.2 was deemed to be the most contagious of all the Covid-19 variants.
The XE variant is a mutation of the BA.1 and BA.2 Omicron strains, referred to as a "recombinant .
As per the initial studies, the XE variant has a growth rate of 9.8 percent over that of BA.2, also known as the stealth variant because of its ability to evade detection.
The World Health Organization has said the latest mutant may be more transmissible than the previous ones.
Last week, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had issued a warning against a new mutant 'XE' variant of Omicron, that may be more transmissible than any strain of Covid-19.
The variant was first detected in the United Kingdom in January, the global health agency said in its weekly epidemiological update.
WHO added that it continues to closely monitor recombinant variants and will issue updates when it has more evidence.
UK’s Health Security Agency also said that at present, there is not enough evidence to draw conclusions about the properties of the XE variant.
India on Wednesday reported 1,086 new Covid cases, with which the country's active cases currently stand at 11,871, according to the Union Health Ministry data. The country recorded 71 Covid deaths during the same period, data showed.
The ministry said that the active cases comprise 0.03 per cent of the total infections, while the national COVID-19 recovery rate remained at 98.76 per cent.
The daily positivity rate was recorded as 0.23 per cent and the weekly positivity rate was 0.22 per cent, according to the ministry.
The number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 4,24,97,567.