There was no official confirmation on where the XE sample was obtained from. But of the two unconfirmed cases reported earlier from the two states, the official said the sample from Maharashtra was not of the new sub-variant.
WEEKS AFTER two unconfirmed cases were reported from Maharashtra and Gujarat, the country’s first case of Omicron sub-variant XE has been confirmed by the Indian SARS-CoV2 Genomics Sequencing Consortium (INSACOG), a network of national testing laboratories set up by the Government.
As of now, experts say, there is no evidence to suggest that a Covid infection from the XE sub-variant is different from those caused by the other Omicron sub-lineages. The new sub-variant has been found to be only about 10 per cent more transmissible than the currently dominant BA.2 variant of Omicron, which triggered the third Covid wave in the country in January.
“Less than a handful of recombinant variants have been detected in the country so far. All of them are from geographically disparate regions. No cluster formation has been seen,” a Government official told The Indian Express.
There was no official confirmation on where the XE sample was obtained from. But of the two unconfirmed cases reported earlier from the two states, the official said the sample from Maharashtra was not of the new sub-variant.
The XE confirmation — in INSACOG’s weekly bulletin — comes at a time when there has been an increase in Covid cases in 12 states, leading to mask mandates. There has, meanwhile, been a decline in cases too in 19 other states, according to Government data till April 25.
