Jaipur: Of the 17 passengers from the United Kingdom (UK) who were missing since their arrival in Rajasthan, the health department was able to trace seven on Tuesday while 10 are still missing.
A total of 811 passengers had arrived in Rajasthan from the UK till December 23. Of these, 17 were untraceable as their addresses and contact numbers were incorrect.
The health department had alerted officials in all 33 districts and sought help from the police to trace them.
State health secretary Siddharth Mahajan said the health department and police had been able to trace seven of the passengers in Jaipur while 10 are still missing.
Meanwhile, seven of the 811 returnees who had tested positive for the Sars-Cov 2 virus are not infected with the mutant strain which was first reported in Britain and is believed to be 70 per cent more infectious.
Ravi Sharma, additional director, rural health said that the seven persons who arrived from the UK are infected with the already existing strain of the coronavirus. Their reports came in on Tuesday.
The central government has sent a list of UK arrivals in the last month from November 23 to December 23 to all states. The Centre sent a list of 811 passengers to Rajasthan.
Of the 811, the health department was able to trace out 794 passengers and 17 were missing, said Sharma.
He said RT-PCR tests for all the 794 had been conducted and only seven had tested positive for the coronavirus.
“The samples for these seven were sent to the National Institute of Virology in Pune for genome sequencing. The test showed that they are not infected with the new Covid strain but with the already existing strain,” he said.
He said the Centre has given new SOPs to states regarding passengers arriving from abroad.
“We are doing random sampling to check if any passengers are infected. If anyone is found positive, their sample will be sent to the ICMR laboratory in Delhi for genome sequencing,” he said.
The number of Covid-19 cases in Rajasthan has been declining since the beginning of December. On Tuesday, a total of 626 new cases and six deaths were recorded.
The total cases in the state stand at 3.06 lakh and the total deaths recorded are 2683. The number of active cases is 10,213 and the total number of tests done so far are 52,13,762.
