Mumbai :Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray on Wednesday said the state government was late in detecting the Delta variant, which led to the devastating second Covid-19 wave. To avoid any such situation in future, a laboratory for genome sequencing has been set up in Mumbai in a very short time, he said.He was speaking at the virtual inauguration of the laboratory set up at Nair Hospital.

The hospital is expected to begin conducting tests to identify variants of Sars-Cov-2 from next week, making it the first civic hospital to conduct genome sequencing in Mumbai. The high-speed machine can run tests on 380 samples per round.

The civic body will incur a cost of ₹10,000 for testing one sample.

“When the first wave of Covid-19 was about to end, a slight rise in daily cases was reported in Amravati. Health experts were of the view that it would come under control, which did not happen. Soon the entire country and the world was again found infected with the virus and later we came to know about the new variant called — Delta. We also came to know about its virulence and transmissibility and body parts it affects the most, a little late. We would have been cautious if we had come to know all this at an early stage,” Thackeray said. Maharashtra is one of the most affected states in second wave of Covid-19 epidemic.“To fight a battle, one is expected to know everything about its enemy such as its strength, among others. Similarly, identifying the type of variant or mutation and their treatment has become absolutely necessary. There was a view that something has to be done as we don’t want to face such a situation again and this genome-sequencing laboratory was set up and that too in a very less time, without putting financial burden on the state government and BMC,” he added.

In April, the state government signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) to sequence 100 Covid-19 positive samples each from 36 districts per month. The CSIR-IGIB report in the third week of June found Delta Plus variants in the state.

Genome sequencing is an exercise to study the changes in the structure of the virus over time. A combination of changes in the ribonucleic acid of the virus can give birth to a new variant. Currently, it takes over two-three months to get test results of genome sequencing which delays the epidemiological study of the mutated virus in infected patients. With the starting of the laboratory, the results of 380 samples will be available within three-four days.