Coronavirus LIVE Updates: Stockpiled 75 Million Doses of Vaccine, Will Have 100 mn by Next Week, Says Adar Poonawalla as Health Ministry Meets to Discuss Rollout

Regulator Central Drug Standard Control Organisation’s (CDSCO) Subject Expert Committee that met yesterday rejected emergency use authorization (EUA) sought by Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech for their Covid-19 vaccines. This comes amid increased number of people being tested positive and states stepping up testing. While two UK returnees in Uttar Pradesh were found to have contracted the new virus, scare remains in Delhi’s neighbouring Gurugram where sample of a 22-year-old United Kingdom return was sent for genome sequencing to ascertain the new variant after he tested positive.

In Mumbai, as many as 1,108 more air passengers arrived from European and West Asian countries, of which 322 were quarantined on Wednesday in the wake of a new COVID-19 strain being found in Britain, a senior civic official said. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) official said a total of 14 flights landed at the Mumbai international airport from Europe and West Asia in the last 24 hours.

Of the 1,108 passengers who arrived in these flights, 322 were kept under institutional quarantine in city hotels, while 705 were sent to other states, he said. According to the official, 81 passengers were exempted from the mandatory institutional quarantine rule on various grounds.

The civic body of Mumbai on Sunday amended its earlier SOPs about institutional quarantine of passengers arriving from European countries, including Britain, and West Asia and aligned them with those framed by the Maharashtra government. As per the amended rule, travellers will have to stay in institutional quarantine for seven days and then a week in home isolation, instead of earlier 14-day institutional quarantine norm.

The new SOPs were implemented after Britain said it has detected a new variant of coronavirus which is said to be even more transmissible than the first one.