Chennai: A passenger from Nigeria and his six contacts have been admitted to the Kings Institute of Preventive Medicine in Chennai for suspected Omicron variant, Tamilnadu Health Minister Ma Subramanian has said.
‘All of them are in the hospital and are asymptomatic. There was an S-gene drop in all of them. We have sent the samples for whole genome sequencing. We will be able to tag it as an Omicron variant only if the INSTEM lab in Bengaluru confirms it,’ Subramanian said. If it turns positive, this will be the State’s first Omicron cluster.
So far, 37 samples were sent to InStem for whole genome sequencing to identify the SARS-CoV-2 variant. Of them, four have returned positive for the Delta variant, and the results of 33 samples were awaited.
‘We have asked InStem to expedite the sequencing of the seven samples as preliminary analysis has raised the suspicion that it could be the Omicron variant,’ he added.
On the S-gene dropout, Health Secretary J Radhakrishnan said maximum mutations occurred in the spike protein. ‘The World Health Organisation has said this will not be detected. This could be an initial marker for the variant. We have 3.5 lakh kits to detect the S-gene dropout,’ he said.
The Minister added 2 per cent of the travellers from non-risk countries were tested on any variation in temperature at mass fever screening at the airports.
The State has tested 11,459 passengers from the 11 at-risk countries and1,699 passengers who have travelled from other countries in the last one week. Of these 37 passengers have tested positive for the viral infection.
While passengers from at-risk countries are not permitted to leave the airport till the RT-PCR results confirm they are negative, passengers from non-risk countries are allowed to go home after their samples are taken for tests.