The Centre on Sunday said there was no case of Delta Plus variant in Tripura, two days after the state government said that 90% of the Covid-19 samples that it sent for genome sequencing contained the highly contagious variant.

On July 9, Deep Kumar Debbarma, the state’s nodal Covid-19 officer, had said that 138 samples of the about 151 sent for genome sequencing were found to contain the Delta Plus variant. He had added that some samples also tested positive for the Delta and Alpha variants.

Following the findings, the state government had announced a total weekend curfew in 13 urban local bodies.

On Sunday, the Union health ministry said in a statement 152 samples were sent from Tripura to the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in West Bengal’s Kalyani city for genome sequencing. It said the genome sequencing revealed that three samples tested positive for Alpha variant, 11 for Kappa and 138 for Delta.

“There was no case of Delta Plus reported among the aforementioned lot of sequenced samples,” the statement said.

In June, the Centre had classified Delta Plus as a “variant of concern”. The Union health ministry classifies a variant as one of concern as soon as there’s evidence of increased transmission.

The variant has an extra mutation in the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that causes Covid-19. The spike protein is the portion of the virus that enables it to penetrate human cells.

Till June 30, India recorded a total of 56 cases of the Delta Plus variant in 12 states. On July 8, two cases of the variant were recorded in Uttar Pradesh.

Meanwhile, India on Monday morning recorded 37,154 new coronavirus cases and 724 deaths. With this, the infection tally climbed to 3,08,74,376 and the toll rose to 4,08,764 since the pandemic broke out in January last year.

The number of recovered patients crossed the three crore mark. The active caseload declined to 4,50,899.