Mumbai: Fifty-one cases of Delta Plus variant of the coronavirus have been detected across 12 states in the country, with Maharashtra reporting the highest number of 22, the Centre said on Friday, stressing that there are still very limited cases of this mutation and it cannot be inferred that it is showing an upward trend.
These 51 cases were detected from over 45,000 samples sequenced so far in the country. Sujeet Singh, Director of the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), said 22 cases of Delta Plus variant have been found in Maharashtra, followed by nine in Tamil Nadu, seven in Madhya Pradesh, three in Kerala, two each in Punjab and Gujarat, and one case each in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana and Karnataka.
“There are very limited number of cases of this mutation (Delta Plus). In India, there are very limited cases (of Delta Plus). There are nearly 50 cases that are found in 12 districts and this has happened in the last three months. It cannot be said that in any district, state it is showing an increasing trend.
Till the time we don’t correlate this we will not say this is a rising trend because its mutations are the same as Delta variant,” Sujeet Singh told a media briefing of the health ministry. There was some variance in the figures in the slides presented at the briefing but officials confirmed later that the total cases of the Delta Plus variant detected so far stand at 51 across 12 states.
So the transmission potential in the Delta variant can also found in the Delta Plus variant, he added. The NCDC is among the 10 institutes involved in genome sequencing of the coronavirus in the country.
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