BHOPAL: A 28-year-old German man, who is a researcher in virology in the European nation, has tested COVID positive in the Jabalpur district of Madhya Pradesh.
The young researcher along with a woman colleague had arrived in Jabalpur on Sunday to attend the wedding of an Indian colleague.
While his Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) sample had tested COVID negative, his RT-PCR test had detected COVID on Monday. The researcher has now been kept under isolation at the COVID Care Center at Jabalpur Medical College.
His sample has been sent for genome sequencing.
The researcher and his female colleague have already taken three jabs of the anti-COVID vaccine (two regular jabs and one booster dose), a health department official posted in Jabalpur told The New Indian Express on Tuesday.
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"So far around 40-50 contacts of the COVID positive German have been traced in Jabalpur. All of them have tested COVID negative," the official informed.
The German national had visited Varanasi in UP too, before coming to Jabalpur.
Germany is among those European nations, which have reported cases of the new COVID virus variant Omicron.
To date, MP has 137 active COVID cases under home or institutional medical treatment.
No case of Omicron variant has so far been reported in MP, the district collector of Indore Manish Singh said on Monday. However, he said, the possibility of the Omicron variant's presence in Indore cannot be ruled out as neighbouring Rajasthan and Maharashtra have already reported such cases.