First case of Omicron in Delhi: Man had arrived from Tanzania

A man who arrived in Delhi from Tanzania and was admitted to the Lok Nayak Hospital (LNJP) in central Delhi on Saturday was found positive with the new Omicron variant, taking the total number of such cases in the country to five.

“Around 25 patients who had returned from foreign travels have been admitted to the hospital. Of these, 14 have tested positive for Covid-19, two are suspected cases and the tests of the rest have returned negative. All of them had mild symptoms and all their samples have been sent for genome sequencing,” said a source in the hospital. Of these 25, three were children.

Among those who have returned, the Tanzania returnee was the only traveller from Africa, while the others were from Europe and US. The patient who tested positive was asymptomatic.

The first two cases were reported from Karnataka this week and two other cases were reported from Gujarat and Maharashtra. Kerala reported that it has sent the sample of a patient suspected with Omicron variant of Coronavirus for genome sequencing.

In case of Karnataka, one person who tested positive was a 46-year-old doctor at a private hospital in the city, with no travel history, and the second was a 66-year-old South African national, who arrived in Bengaluru via Dubai last month. None of the South African national’s 24 primary and 240 secondary contacts tested positive. Karnataka health officials stated that among the 218 contacts of the doctor, three primary and two secondary contacts have tested positive.

A 72-year-old man from Zimbabwe, who reached Gujarat’s Jamnagar last week, tested positive for the variant, while in Maharashtra, it was a man from the state who had travelled to Mumbai from South Africa via Dubai and Delhi.

The new variant, first reported by South Africa on November 25, has been described as a "variant of concern" by the World Health Organisation (WHO).