Karnataka Health Minister Dr K Sudhakar on Saturday said that the state Health Department will discuss matters concerned with prevention and containment of new variant of coronavirus and come up with the guidelines regarding the same.
Speaking to the media, the Health Minister also said that there will be new guidelines for New Year celebrations and he will conduct a meeting with the Home Department regarding this soon.Dr Sudhakar said that third stage trials are being conducted including in Karnataka. "Anyone can volunteer to take the vaccine at this stage. I have personally appealed to many frontline warriors, especially, medical students to volunteer for trials," he added.
"A total of 1,638 out of 2,500 returnees from the UK have been tested and 14 of them have been found positive. Their swab samples have been sent to the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences (NIMHANS) for gene-sequencing to find out whether it is a new strain of the virus.
This process needs 48 hours. Once we get the reports it will be sent to the central government. About 38,500 people have returned from the UK to India. Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) will collate reports from all states and then come up with a report," Dr Sudhakar explained.
"All necessary precautions are being taken at airports. We have also made arrangements to test people who do not have a negative report at airports itself," the Health Minister added.
( With inputs from ANI )
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor