Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain on Sunday (December 5) said that the first omicron case has been detected in Delhi. The patient has been admitted to LNJP Hospital had returned from Tanzania.

Till now, 17 people who tested positive for Covid have been admitted to the hospital.

This is the fifth omicron case detected in India so far. The first two cases of Omicron were reported in Karnataka.

On Saturday, the third and the fourth case of the infection were reported from Gujarat’s Jamnagar and Maharashtra’s Dombivli respectively.

A new variant of COVID-19 was first reported to the World Health Organisation (WHO) from South Africa on November 25. As per the WHO, the first known confirmed B.1.1.529 infection was from a specimen collected on November 9 this year.

On November 26, the WHO named the new COVID-19 variant B.1.1.529, which has been detected in South Africa, as ‘Omicron’. The WHO has classified Omicron as a ‘variant of concern’.