Twenty passengers who arrived in India from Britain on Tuesday have tested positive for COVID-19.

At the Ahmedabad airport, RT-PCR tests were performed on 275 passengers, including crew members of the flight from London to Ahmedabad. A total of four passengers tested positive were admitted to the SVP hospital. The RT-PCR test revealed that the CT value (viral load) of all four passengers was 19, 23, 25 and 28, respectively.

The blood samples of passengers who tested positive will be sent to Pune to check if they have the new strain of coronavirus found recently in the UK. More importantly, none of the four passengers have any Covid-19 symptoms and yet the virus load was found to be very high. A CT value of 14 to 22 usually indicates a higher viral load.

Two of the four patients who came to Ahmedabad from the UK were admitted to the SVP hospital. in that one is a couple, one patient is from Bharuch and one from Diu. The SVP has separate wards for all four. In them, symptoms of a new strain will be known after four days.

Of the 20 that tested positive, six were on a flight that landed in Delhi at 11.30 pm on Monday, two on a flight that came into Kolkata on Sunday night, four that arrived in Ahmedabad on Tuesday and eight, including a crew member, in Amritsar who also reached on Wednesday. All were direct Air India flights from London.