New Delhi (TIP): Fourteen more people have tested positive for a hyper-infectious, mutant strain of the coronavirus in India, the Union health ministry said on Wednesday,  Dec 30, taking the tally of such cases in the country to 20. Four of the new patients were from Delhi, officials n the city-state confirmed.

On Tuesday, Dec 29, six people — three from Karnataka and one each from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh — who returned from the UK were found to be carrying the new variant, which is known as VOC-202012/01.

Of the 14 new cases on Wednesday, eight were detected at the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in Delhi, four at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences Hospital (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru, and one each at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) in Delhi and the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBG) in West Bengal’s Kalyani.

Apart from the four Delhi residents, a 33-year-old woman from Noida’s Sector 50, who returned from the UK?on December 18, was found to be infected by the mutant strain on Wednesday.

“As of Wednesday, of the total Covid positive UK returnees having the new strain, four are residents of Delhi. This is as per the reports conveyed to the Delhi government by NCDC,” a senior government official said, requesting anonymity. This number was later confirmed by Delhi chief secretary Vijay Dev.

Elsewhere, while Bengal confirmed its first case of the new strain, the Karnataka government said a total of seven people, including the three detected on Tuesday, tested positive in the southern state after genome sequencing of positive samples released by the Indian Sars-Cov-2 Genomics Consortium (Insacog) labs.

The place of residence of the other new patients was not known immediately.

Positive samples of those who returned from the UK recently have been sequenced in six of the 10 designated, government-run Insacog labs across the country.

According to government estimates, about 33,000 passengers arrived from the UK at various Indian airports from November 25 to December 23. Authorities have begun conducting the gold-standard RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) test on these passengers in batches, though tracing all of them is becoming a difficult task with hundreds furnishing vague addresses and switching off their phones.