Tourists from Shanghai visiting Shaanxi positive for Delta

Two Shanghai tourists who recently tested positive for COVID-19 in northwest Shaanxi Province have been identified as having the Delta variant, China Central Television reported on Saturday.

According to Shaanxi's disease control and prevention center, it launched virus gene sequencing after receiving samples from the Shanghai tourists surnamed Yan and Jiang who were confirmed with infection from 12am on October 16 to 7am on October 17.

The result done at 1am on October 18 showed that the virus strain was the Delta variant.

Before the current outbreak, no Delta variant was detected from locally transmitted cases in Shaanxi. And the viral genomes of cases 1 and 2 had low homology and no correlations with the recently imported cases from overseas in Shaanxi.

After the sequencing result was reported to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, preliminary comparison and analysis revealed that the mutant strain was not related to the Erenhot outbreak in Inner Mongolia and the Horgos outbreak in Xinjiang during the same period.

At the same time, the whole genome sequencing of case 1 was determined as the reference sequence for this outbreak, the report said.

The sequencing of the five people who traveled with the two Shanghai tourists and confirmed infection on October 18 has also been reported to the CDC. The sequencing of the three cases confirmed on October 22 is still underway.