On Monday, four more people were tested positive for the new coronavirus variant Omicron in Kerala. With this, the total tally of the omicron cases in the state touched 15, the state health department said. All four patients are from the Thiruvananthapuram district.

While two cases of the new variant were detected in patients aged 41 and 6, the other two were a 32-year old man who came from Nigeria on December 17 and a 27-year-old woman who was included in the contact list of flight passengers. The new variant was confirmed in the testing conducted at Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology.

Kerala had detected its first Omicron case on December 12 in Ernakulam district when a person who had returned from the UK tested positive.