New Delhi, July 09, 2021 (PPI-OT):Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has detected two cases of Kappa variant of Covid-19. As per Indian media, a 66-year-old man Uttar Pradesh’s Sant Kabir Nagar, who tested positive for Kappa variant in UP’s Sant Kabir Nagar has died. Officials said that the man had tested positive for COVID-19 on May 27 and was shifted to the medical college on June 12. However, he died on June 14, said the officials, adding he “had no travel history”. The other patient is a 23-year-old resident doctor at the Baba Raghav Das Medical College, Gorakhpur.

The variant was detected following the collection of his sample on June 13 during the routine genome sequencing exercise and sent to CSIRs Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi. Some reports claimed that there have been three cases of Kappa variant in Uttar Pradesh and the first patient, a 66-year-old resident of Sant Kabir Nagar, has succumbed to the disease. The Kappa COVID-19 variant, which is also known as ‘B.1.617.1’, was first discovered in India in October last year. So far, India has detected over 3,500 cases of the Kappa variant in around 30,000 samples collected as a part of the GISAID initiative.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has labelled the Kappa strain as a “variant of interest”, along with Eta, Iota and Lambda mutations of COVID-19. ‘Variants of interest’ means that mutation of coronavirus which “have been identified to cause community transmission or multiple COVID-19 cases or clusters, or have been detected in multiple countries”. WHO at present has not classified this variant as a variant of concern? Like Lambda, which has already spread in 30 countries across the world, Kappa is a variant of interest.

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