VADODARA/SURAT/AHMEDABAD: As the state government relaxed curfew guidelines looking at the drop in number of daily Covid cases, two cases of Delta Plus variants were reported from Gujarat on Saturday.
The announcement was made by the Union health ministry.
Confirming the news, local government officials said that Surat and Vadodara had reported one case each.
Those infected include a 22-year-old medical student of Surat Municipal Corporation’s SMIMER Hospital and a 38-year-old woman from Jarod village in Waghodia taluka of Vadodara.
ACS (health & family welfare) Manoj Aggarwal told TOI that Gujarat is currently sending almost 25-30% of its daily positive Covid-19 samples for sequencing.
“We are relying heavily on timely input on the variants based on genomic sequencing data from Gujarat Biotechnology & Research Centre and National Institute of Virology (NIV).
We have already carried out detailed contact tracing of both the cases, and have not found further cases of Delta Plus variant,” he said.
The ACS said surveillance has been intensified in both Surat and Vadodara.
The presence of Delta Plus variant in the two cases was confirmed by NIV, Pune.
The samples of the Surat student was sent on April 10.
He has recovered already but was not vaccinated when nasopharyngeal swab was collected, official sources said.
“The strain can be confirmed only through genome sequencing and we sent 5% of the total samples collected during surveillance.
The samples are randomly selected,” said Dr Ashish Naik, deputy commissioner, health, SMC In the Vadodara case, the woman’s family has roots in Maharashtra.
“We received information from the state government that genome sequencing of samples taken from a 38-year-old female resident of Jarod — who had tested Covid-19 positive in April in Maharashtra — is a case of new Delta Plus variant,” said Dr Uday Tilawat, district immunization officer and additional district health officer.
“The female is completely healthy,” he said.
Tilawat added neither the female resident nor her family members had tested positive in Vadodara nor were their samples collected here.
“The family has four members.
Her husband works with the National Disaster Response Force.
They had gone to Maharashtra where their samples were tested.
The female had tested positive there and recovered as well.
They are residing here since May 8.