NEW DELHI : The Indian SARS Cov2 Genomic Consortium (INSACOG) on Wednesday confirmed that the covid-19 variant found by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is not the XE variant.
The National Institute of Biomedical Genomics based in Kolkata said it was not the XE variant, Dr N.K. Arora, chairman, National Immunization Technical Advisory Group, and co-chair of INSACOG, said in an interview.
Samples of a 50-year-old covid patient who returned from South Africa in February were sent to many INSACOG labs to validate the presence of the XE variant. “When BMC claimed that the XE variant was detected in Mumbai, it looked suspicious to us.
We alerted all our channels. As when new mutants are described, at least three layers of testing are done. Tests conducted by National Institute of Biomedical Genomics confirmed that it was the XM or XJ variant from X-series of Omicron," he said.