BMC sends sample data to Central govt lab for XE variant reconfirmation

A day after the Union health ministry denied the sample of a South African woman being a case of XE variant of Covid-19, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Thursday sent the sample data to the Centre-run National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in West Bengal for reconfirmation

A day after the Union health ministry denied the sample of a South African woman being a case of XE variant of Covid-19, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Thursday sent the sample data to the Centre-run National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in West Bengal for reconfirmation.

A man gets vaccinated against Covid-19 in Thane on Thursday. Praful Gangurde/HT Photo

Mumbai guardian minister Aaditya Thackeray confirmed this on Twitter and said citizens should not panic.

“The person with the suspected new variant has recovered fully & the high-risk contacts have been covid negative. The samples have been sent to NIBMG, to reconfirm the type of strain. We are constantly working to ensure that we are all safe. I urge people to not panic,” he tweeted.

Dr Mangala Gomare, chief of BMC’s health department, said, “We were asked to send the sample for reconfirmation and hence, we sent it on Thursday. We will wait to hear from them.”

Additional municipal commissioner Suresh Kakani too advised people to not panic and said XE variant is not a concern as of now. “We have shared the data with relevant agencies, and we will go by what the result is in the reconfirmation process.”

Like always, BMC officials said, a quality check was done with National Institute of Virology, Pune, before announcing the results. However, later in the day, the Union health ministry said an analysis by Insacog (Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium) using FAST Q Tool showed that in all probability the variant was not XE.

The sample in question was of a 50-year-old woman who had returned from South Africa on February 10, 2022, and tested negative for Covid-19. In a routine test on March 2, she tested positive and was quarantined in a hotel. She tested negative in another test conducted the next day.