At least nine more passengers arriving from Britain tested positive for Covid-19 on Wednesday, taking the total number of UK-returned travellers who are found to have contracted the
virus since Sunday to 29. It is unclear whether those testing positive have the old strain or the new variant. Meanwhile, states including Maharashtra,
Karnataka and Bengal have undertaken an exercise to track fliers arriving from Britain in the last few weeks.
Among those whose reports came positive on Wednesday were six fliers who landed at Indira Gandhi Airport in the national capital, a Bhubaneswar resident , a person from Bengaluru and a woman from
Rajahmundry in
Andhra Pradesh who disappeared from Delhi airport without informing anyone after testing positive.
The swab samples of six fliers who landed at IGIA have been sent to the
National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) for another test using genome sequencing to determine the virus strain. All the six fliers have been quarantined.
In Maharashtra, after the emergence of the highly contagious mutant virus strain, a massive surveillance drive has been launched across the state to check for the infection among travellers who came in from UK between November 25 and December 23.
It is learnt the Airport Health Organisation (APHO) Mumbai received a communication from the centre seeking details of passengers who landed at Mumbai airport from London in the past 21 days, said a source. “The information and addresses of these passengers has already been sent,” the official added. APHO is a unit of the international health division under the directorate general of health services, ministry of health and family welfare.