C.1.2 Covid-19 variant: no cases of the new strain in India so far, says Centre

The central government on Wednesday said that India has not detected any case of the new C.1.2 variant of the Coronavirus. This new strain of the virus, which was first found in South Africa in May, has been reported in at least 6 countries, World Health Organisation confirmed.

While the public health body further cautioned that the C.1.2 strain could possibly be more transmissible and evade protection provided by the vaccines, South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Disease (NICD) said otherwise. NICD issued an alert about the C.1.2 lineage this week, but said that the Delta variant remains the most dominant strain of Covid-19 in the country.

Although the WHO hasn't classified the virus as a variant of concern, South African authorities said that the variant is reported to have undergone few key mutations which could trigger it to become a variant of concern. Experts say that these mutations may affect things like whether it evades the immune response or transmits faster.

As per an earlier done study, the strain has a mutation rate of about 41.8 mutations/year which is about twice as fast as the current global mutation rate of other variants.