Is it India's first case of Covid-19 variant ‘XE’ or not? Health ministry denies media reports confirming first case

Is it India's first case of Covid-19 variant ‘XE’ or not? The BMC did think it was, and even said so in a media release. One case of the Kappa variant had also been detected, it was claimed. The findings were based on regular testing of samples.

There was reason for concern as the new mutant is believed to be more transmissible than any other strain of Covid-19, the World Health Organisation had said last week.

But even as the BMC finding was lapped up by news portals and TV channels, the Union Home Ministry came out with a rebuttal, stating that the evidence doesn't suggest the presence of COVID 'XE' mutant in India; the ministry also denied media reports which had claimed the first case of the variant had been detected in the country.

The government sources in the health ministry said that the Fast Q files of the sample, said to be the 'XE' variant, were analysed by INSACOG (Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium) which inferred that the genomic constitution of this variant doesn't correlate with the genomic picture of 'XE'.

‘‘The present evidence does not suggest that it is 'XE' variant of COVID-19," a source said.

The eleventh series of genome sequencing undertaken by the BMC had shown one person positive for XE variant -- that is, before the INSACOG raised doubts about the same. Dr Jayanthi Shashri, a microbiologist who has been heading BMC's genome sequencing exercise, was present at the INSACOG meeting to discuss the findings. She said they had been asked to send the sequencing data to the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBMG) for further analysis to confirm the XE variant.

Mangala Gomare, the BMC executive health officer, had said that the woman, who was found to have contacted the XE variant, had arrived from South Africa and tested positive for Coronavirus three weeks after arriving. She was asymptomatic and tested negative the next day. She did not have any travel history prior to that and had been vaccinated with both doses of the COMIRNATY vaccine.

The initial finding was enough to trigger a scare. Suresh Kakani, Additional Municipal Commissioner, said they had even contacted all close contacts of the patient and found that they were all stable

The XE mutant may 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 new strain was detected in the UK at the start of the New Year. Britain's health agency said on April 3 that XE was first detected on January 19 and 637 cases of the new variant have been reported in the country so far.

XE is a "recombinant" which is a mutation of BA'1 and BA.2 Omicron strains. Recombinant mutations emerge when a patient is infected by multiple variants of Covid. The variants mix up their genetic material during replication and form a new mutation, UK experts said in a paper published in British Medical Journal.