A 66-year-old man who has become one of India's first two cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant arrived in the country on November 20 and left for Dubai on a flight seven days later, official records showed on Thursday.
According to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), Bengaluru's municipal corporation, the man arrived from South Africa with a negative COVID-19 test report on November 20 at the city's international airport.
He had been vaccinated with both doses of a coronavirus vaccine.
Upon his arrival, he checked into a hotel the same day and was found to be positive for COVID-19.
When a government doctor visited him at the hotel, he was found to be asymptomatic and advised to self-isolate.
Being a traveller from one of the nations designated "at-risk" given the Omicron breakout, his samples were collected again and sent for genome sequencing on November 22.
All 24 people who came in contact with him were tested and found to be negative for COVID-19. The authorities also tested 240 secondary contacts - people who had come in contact with the primary contacts of the patent - and found them to be negative as well.
Separately, on November 23, the man took another COVID-19 test at a private lab and the result came back negative.
On November 27, around midnight, he checked out of the hotel, took a cab to the airport and boarded a flight to Dubai.
That he had the Omicron variant of the coronavirus was officially confirmed only on Thursday at a Union Health Ministry briefing in Delhi.
His identity has not been disclosed to protect his privacy, Health Ministry's Joint Secretary Lav Agarwal said.
Besides him, another man - a 46-year-old health worker in Bengaluru - has also tested positive for the Omicron variant.
First discovered in southern Africa, the highly infectious strain represents a fresh challenge to global efforts to battle the pandemic with several nations already re-imposing restrictions many had hoped were a thing of the past.
It is the latest coronavirus strain to emerge since the start of the pandemic, including the currently dominant Delta variant, which was first detected in India in October 2020.
While early indications have suggested the heavily-mutated Omicron may be markedly more contagious than previous variants, there has been no evidence of the strain any deadlier.
Here is the travel history of the patient released by the Bengaluru municipal corporation:
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