The number of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome positive cases shot up to 20 with nine more persons in Pune testing positive for the deadly virus on Wednesday.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde told reporters that the nine were staff members of Siddharth Hospital, where the family of the first SARS patient Stanley D'Silva underwent treatment. The results of the second round of tests were still awaited, he added.

Earlier, Stanley, his mother Vimla, sister Julie and uncle Joseph Pawar, a Hongkong businessman Bhaskar Murthy and driver from Ambernath had tested positive in Maharashtra. The D'Silva family, however, was discharged on Tuesday after complete recovery.

All the nine are females with two of them being doctors and the rest paramedics. But health officials have no clue about the people these nine cases would have come in contact with. "We have not received any information on that yet," Director General of Health Services Dr S P Agarwal admitted.

A 65-year-old man from Amritsar, Punjab, who according to the health officials has no history of foreign travel or contact with infected persons, has also tested positive in the initial test for SARS. The man is being treated in isolation at Ram Saran Trust hospital, Amritsar. "His initial PCR tests have tested positive for SARS, we are doing gene sequencing to confirm whether it is SARS. He was admitted as a case of pneumonia, which is not uncommon at his age," Chief of the Indian Council of Medical Research Dr NK Ganguly said.

Health officials, however, excluded the Amritsar case from the final tally of SARS positive cases saying they would wait for the result of the gene sequencing test. The test results of 15 more cases are awaited, Dr Agarwal said.

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