Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan reviewed the status of passengers coming from the UK where a new faster spreading strain of coronavirus was detected, prompting several countries to impose fresh travel restrictions. The health ministry said positive cases have been found in the states of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Goa, Punjab, Gujarat and Kerala.
Bhushan reviewed the response measures of these states in a meeting held through video conferencing on Wednesday.
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ICMR DG; health secretaries of states and union territories; NHM MD; Arti Ahuja, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Health; Dr Sujeet Singh, Director, NCDC, and other senior health officials were also present in the meeting.
“The Standard Operating Procedure issued by this Ministry on December 22 for epidemiological surveillance and response in the context of new variant of SARS-CoV-2 virus detected in United Kingdom was discussed in detail in the meeting,” the ministry said in a statement.
The Centre advised states and Union Territories to access the details of passengers from UK to India from the online portal AIR-SUVIDHA and Bureau of Immigration. The states were asked to send the samples of those found positive to the laboratories identified for genome sequencing.
The states were also advised to co-ordinate with the respective Airport Health Offices (APHOs) and surveillance officials in their state in order to ensure adherence to the SOPs.
During the meeting, the health ministry shared the list of six identified laboratories along with the contact details of their nodal officers was also shared with the states. These laboratories are: CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative BiologyNew Delhi; CSIR- Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad; DBT- Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar; DBT-InStem-NCBS, Bangalore;DBT-National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBMG), Kalyani, West Bengal; ICMR- National Institute of Virology, Pune.
The ministry said the number of such designated labs would increase over time and their details would be shared with the states.
More than 40 countries, including India, have banned travel to and from the UK, a move several scientists said was necessary in view of the rapid spread of the new viral strain, VUI-202012/0, that was detected on September 21.