New Delhi: People travelling to India from Dubai and the UK have been pointed out to be the primary source of the spread of the novel coronavirus infection in the country. This as per an analytical study done by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mandi.

According to the research, the COVID-19 was imported to Indian states mainly due to international travels, the study has been published in the Journal of Travel Medicine.

“Dubai’s eigenvector centrality was the highest that made it the most influential node. The statistical metrics calculated from the data revealed that Dubai and the UK played a crucial role in spreading the disease in Indian states and were the primary sources of COVID-19 importations into India,” the study suggested.

“We tracked the spread of COVID-19 and its diffusion from the global to national level and identified a few super spreaders who played a central role in the transmission of the disease in India. The COVID-19 spread in phase one was traced using the travelling history of the patients, and it was found that most of the transmissions were local,” Sarita Azad, Assistant Professor, IIT Mandi, told PTI.

The study has also found that infected cases from Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh played less role in spreading the disease outside their communities. Whereas infected people in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Kerala, Jammu and Kashmir, and Karnataka played a significant role in the local transmission, and some of them caused interstate transfer too.

India’s COVID-19 caseload is close to breaching the 60 lakh with 88,600 fresh infections being reported on Sunday, while the number of people having recovered from the disease crossed 49 lakh pushing the national recovery rate to 82.46 per cent, according to the Union Health Ministry.

The total coronavirus cases mounted to 59,92,532, while the death toll climbed to 94,503 with 1,124 people succumbing to the disease in a span of 24 hours, data updated at 8 am showed.