UPDATED: January 7, 2021 21:31 IST
A health worker takes a nasal swab of passenger for Covid-19 test at Bandra Terminus railway station, Nov 2020 (Mandar Deodhar) Even as apprehensions grow about new strains of the coronavirus outpacing vaccinations around the world, Indian scientists are putting the mutant strains under watch and bracing to launch a countrywide genome sequencing initiative. They have also highlighted concerns about how the virus lingers in the air and airborne transmission of Covid in a closed environment.
A joint study by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, and the Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTech), Chandigarh, has found the virus in the air samples of Covid wards in three hospitals each in the two cities. On January 5, the CCMB and IMTech released their data on the airborne nature of SARS-CoV-2. Researchers found the virus in infectious aerosols; smaller sized aerosols could be formed due to evaporation of water from large