India has successfully cultured the new ‘more infectious’ coronavirus strain, which had originated in the United Kingdom, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said on Saturday. The British Government had recently announced that the newly identified strain of the virus found in their population is up to 70 per cent more transmissible, following which India sprung into action. The country put in place a pro-active and preventive strategy to detect and contain the variant. So far, the new variant has been detected in 29 UK returnees through genome sequencing.

Culture is the process by which cells are grown under controlled conditions, generally, outside their natural environment, news agency PTI said in its report. “UK-variant of the virus, with all signature changes, is now successfully isolated and cultured at the National Institute of Virology (NIV) from the clinical specimens collected from UK-returnees,” the ICMR said.

According to ICMR, no other country has managed to successfully isolate and culture the UK variant. India has so far reported 29 cases of the new UK COVID strain which has been spreading rapidly around Britain and other countries. Apart from India, it has been reported from Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Japan, Lebanon and Singapore.

The new strain first came to light in December in the United Kingdom but the samples in which it was found were collected in September. This led to the UK government announcing a strict Tier 4 lockdown in some parts of the UK, with nine European countries soon reporting cases of the new strain. After the UK government came to know about the new strain on December 8, it informed the World Health Organisation (WHO) about the new variant – which has maintained that there is still no evidence of the pathogen behaving any differently from the existing types of virus. However, pharmaceutical companies have maintained that they expect their vaccines to work against all variants.

As a precautionary measure, the aviation ministry has restricted the operations of flights between India and the UK. Flights from India to the UK can start on January 6, while operations from the UK to India will begin on January 8. The schedule is valid till January 23, civil aviation minister Hardeep Singh Puri clarified on Saturday. The ministry has also issued a set of guidelines for travelling between the two nations. All passengers from the UK will have to submit self-declaration form on the online portal of Delhi Airport at least 72 hours before the scheduled travel. They need to carry their negative report of the RT-PCR test, which should have been conducted within 72 hours prior to undertaking the journey.