Mumbai reports India's first case of highly transmissible XE COVID-19 variant

The first case of the new Covid-19 variant XE has been reported from Mumbai on Wednesday. The case was detected after genome sequencing of samples. The XE variant was first found in the UK on January 19 this year. The WHO has said due to its high transmissibility, XE could become the most dominant strain in near future. In a press release, Mumbai civic body, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), said that of the 230 samples from Mumbai, 228 samples are of the Omicron variant and one patient is affected by the ‘kapa’ subtype, while the other is by the ‘XE’ subtype of Covid-19. According to the BMC, the condition of the patient infected with the XE variant is not serious. “With the Covid-19 situation under complete control, public life has now returned to normal. However, in many parts of the world, the risk of Covid infection is still high. Therefore, citizens should spontaneously maintain cowardly preventive behaviour without being ignorant,” said BMC. The civic body appealed to all to follow Covid-19 protocols like the use of masks, safe distancing and practice of hand hygiene. According to the WHO, the XE variant accounts for a small fraction of the cases but it’s highly transmissible. “Early-day estimates indicate a community growth rate advantage of 10 percent as compared to BA.2, however, this finding requires further confirmation," WHO had said. The British health body, UK Health Security Agency, had called XE Omicron strain a stealth variant as it becomes really hard to detect it. It has only been found in less than 1% of all detected cases in Britain. XE is a recombinant strain which essentially means it is a mutant hybrid of two existing strains. The XE variant of Covid-19 is a mutation of the Omicron strains – the BA.1 and BA.2. India recorded 1,086 new Covid-19 cases on Wednesday with seven people dead. The total number of cases hovers over 4.3 crore. The number of active cases is now around 0.03% of the total Covid-19 infections in the country, according to Union Health Ministry data. The recovery rate stood at an encouraging 98.76 percent.