Tribune News Service
New Delhi, June 4
The Indian Sars-Cov2 Genomic Consortia and the National Centre for Disease Control on Friday showed that B.1.617, the Indian Covid virus variant, recently chri
A train passenger is tested for Covid after arriving in Mumbai. Photograph: Sujit Jaiswal/AFP/Getty Images
A train passenger is tested for Covid after arriving in Mumbai. Photograph: Sujit Jaiswal/AFP/Getty Images
Thu 20 May 2021 07.45 EDT
Last modified on Thu 20 May 2021 10.54 EDT
The variant that threatens the British summer has already done far more damage in India. In October last year a sample from the western state of Maharashtra containing what would later be identified as the B.1.617.3 variant was sequenced and uploaded to Gisaid, a global database of Covid-19 samples from across the world. The variant had multiple mutations located on the virusâs spike protein that binds it to receptor cells in the human body. Some of these mutations were present in other variants, or seemed capable of evading immunity. All of this should have set off alarm bells in India and led to increased surveillance across the world.