Its official, the first case of COVID-19’s Omicron variant has been detected in Mumbai and confirmed by NCDC, Delhi on Saturday.
The infectee is a 67-year-old male who had travelled from Mumbai to Gujarat’s Vadodara, where he suffered from mild fever on March 12.
His samples were sent for genome sequencing tests and the results, which came out on Saturday, showed it to be Omicron XE.
XE variant is a combination of BA.1 and BA.2 strains of Omicron and is found to be responsible for enhanced viral transmission as per preliminary reports.
