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NEW DELHI: Aviation regulator DGCA has extended the suspension of domestic flights by a fortnight till April 14 in view of the ongoing 21-day nationwide lockdown due to the coronavirus crisis.

The Director-General of Civil Aviation had earlier stopped operations of passenger flights on all domestic routes from March 25 to March 31.

“All domestic operators engage in scheduled, non-scheduled and private aircaraft operations in India shall ensure strict compliance of the order,” said a DGCA circular.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown to contain the spread of the disease.

Mumbai

The first images from India of the coronavirus causing the Covid-19 disease have been caught by scientists in Pune, using transmission electron microscope imaging. They were published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research.

“Coronavirus have a crown-like appearance and these spikes on the surface give this virus family its name, as corona means crown in Latin. They have evolved to recognise a variety of receptors, including protein receptors and sugar receptors, and enter cells by first recognising a host-cell-surface receptor for viral attachment, and then fusing viral and host membranes for entry,” said Dr Nirmal K Ganguly, former director general, Indian Council of Medical Research.

The images of Sars-Cov-2, the virus that Causes Covid-19, are from the throat swab of the first laboratory-confirmed case in India on January 30, 2020. The woman, among three students studying medicine in Wuhan, was diagnosed with Covid-19 after returning home.

Covid-19 has infected at least 540,000 people and killed close to 25,000 since the first cluster of cases were detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019.

Gene sequencing of the samples from Kerala done at NIV Pune found the virus was a 99.98% match with the virus in China’s Wuhan.

“One particular virus particle was very well preserved, showing features very typical of coronaviruses. This particle was 75 nm in size and showed patchy stain pooling on the surface and a distinct envelope projection ending in round peplomeric (glycoprotein spike on the viral surface). These bind only to certain receptors on the host cell,” said Dr Atanu Basu, deputy director and head of electron microscopy and pathology at NIV Pune, which published the imaging.

To get the image, his group used centrifugation to remove the debris from a 500 μl sample from the throat swab of the Kerala Covid-19 case confirmed using the highly sensitive, by real-time, polymerase chain reaction.

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