"As regards the issue of the South African variant, this is a developing incident. This is a very developing story," MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said at the weekly briefing. He was responding to a query about the new variant labelled as B.1.1.529 by scientists. The variant was first detected in South Africa this week and scientists there have said B.1.1.529 has a large number of mutations. As per reports, there could be between 30 to 50 mutations in the spike protein of the B.1.1.529 variant.

Source: dna November 26, 2021 19:15 UTC