Till now, twelve returnees from the United Kingdom tested positive for COVID-19.
Civic health officials of the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) informed that nearly 2,600 passengers have arrived in Mumbai from the UK as well as other Europe and Middle East countries between November 25 and December 28.
Of the 12 passengers, five of them had returned to Mumbai last week and seven of them had arrived before December 22.
Dr Mangala Gomare, executive health officer, BMC, informed that the state government has handed over the details of the passengers who have returned to Mumbai to the civic body. Health officials are tracing them.
"The civic body has procured the records of the passengers who returned from the UK and we are assessing them on a daily basis and updating our records," Gomare told the Free Press Journal.
According to the sources from BMC, samples of these twelve passengers have been sent to the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune, to find out if they have been infected by the new strain of the virus.
Nearly 416 passengers of the 934 passengers who arrived in Mumbai from various European and Middle East countries this week have been kept in quarantine in various city hotels.
According to the standard operating procedures of BMC, passengers will be kept in quarantine for seven days, following which an RT-PCR test will be conducted on the seventh day at their own cost. If the report is negative, then the patient would be discharged from quarantine within seven days on the condition that the passenger follows a week of mandatory home quarantine. If the passenger tests positive, then he will be shifted to a designated COVID-19 facility in Mumbai.