#Omicron | Govt of Maharashtra revises its guidelines for passengers arriving in the state
In the case of domestic air travel, Passengers will either have to be fully vaccinated or compulsorily carry RT-PCR Test certificate showing negative result within 72 hours before boarding pic.twitter.com/svHb56CHe8
Ministry of Health Joint Secretary Lav Agarwal said two cases of the omicron variant of the coronavirus have been detected in Karnataka.
He added that contact tracing has been done for the two patients, who are males aged 66 years and 46 years. The two patients are South Africa returnees and all primary and secondary contacts have been traced and tested.
Ministry of Health Joint Secretary Lav Agarwal, in a press briefing, said that the omicron variant of the coronavirus could be five times more competitively infectious. He added that the variant has more than twice the number of bad spike mutations than Delta.
Agarwal added that it is too early to assess whether the infection causes more severe disease than other variants.
He was citing a study by Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, an American epidemiologist public health scientist who is currently a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC. He was formerly a faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School.
Six passengers who flew in from 'at-risk' countries have tested positive for Covid-19 on Dec. 1, the first day of operations under fresh guidelines issued for international travelers by the centre amid renewed concerns surrounding the Omicron variant.
In a press release, the government said a total of 11 international flights landed at various airports of the country except Lucknow, from midnight to 4 p.m. on Dec. 1, from "at risk" countries. These carried 3,476 passengers, which were all administered RT-PCR tests, out of which six were found Covid-19 positive.
"The samples of the Covid-19 positive passengers have been sent to Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) labs for genomic sequencing," it said.
