All five UK coronavirus strain patients have recovered, says BMC

A civic worker collects the swab sample of a passenger at Mumbai airport. File pic

Five passengers from the UK who had been found to be infected with the fast-spreading strain of COVID-19 have recovered, the BMC has said. The civic body also sought to reassure the public saying fliers who had arrived from other parts of Europe and East Asia and had tested positive for coronavirus do not have the mutated form. India banned flights from Britain between December 23 and January 7 after the country reported a surge in infections due to the new strain.

In Mumbai, civic health workers traced about 2,600 passengers who had arrived in the city from the UK between November 25 and December 21. Of these fliers, 26 tested positive for COVID-19, while five were found to be carrying the mutated strain after their samples were sent for genome sequencing to the National Institute of Virology, Pune. Two of the five patients had already tested negative for coronavirus before the reports came from NIV.

"Now all of them have tested negative and are without symptoms. We traced 40 high-risk contacts of these five people. They are also found negative," said Suresh Kakani, additional commissioner of BMC. So far, 16 of the 26 fliers have recovered.