The woman first infected with what is believed to be a new XE strain of the coronavirus in India has completely recovered, Cabinet Minister of Indian state of Maharashtra Aaditya Thackeray said on Thursday, adding that contact tracing revealed no linked infections
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th April, 2022) The woman first infected with what is believed to be a new XE strain of the coronavirus in India has completely recovered, Cabinet Minister of Indian state of Maharashtra Aaditya Thackeray said on Thursday, adding that contact tracing revealed no linked infections.
On Wednesday, the authorities in Maharashtra's metropolis of Mumbai reported that genome sequencing of the coronavirus detected the first case of COVID-19 variant XE in a 50-year-old fully vaccinated woman who had arrived from South Africa.
"The person with the suspected new variant has recovered fully & the high-risk contacts have been covid negative. The samples have been sent to NIBMG (the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics), to reconfirm the type of strain. We are constantly working to ensure that we are all safe. I urge people to not panic," Thackeray said on Twitter.
Medical practitioners distinguish three different lineages arising from mutations of various COVID-19 strains, such as XD, XE, and XF. The XD and XF lineages are a compound of Delta and Omicron BA.1 subline variants, while the XE line is a compound of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 subvariants.
So far, the new XE strain has already been confirmed in 637 patients in the United Kingdom. The UK Health Security Agency claimed that currently there is no sufficient evidence to report on transmissibility and severity of the new variant.
India has the world's second highest cumulative number of COVID-19 cases confirmed since the pandemic began after the United States, with a total of 43 million people infected since March 2020. Meanwhile, infection rate has decreased substantially in recent weeks, with the daily incidence amounting to approximately 1,100 cases.
