With 28 more people testing positive for Omicron in Odisha, the tally of the COVID-19 variant crossed the century mark to reach 103 on Monday, an official said.
The cases were detected from over 250 samples sent for genome sequencing. The new infectees included people with foreign travel history and local transmission cases, said an official of Institute of Life Science-Bhubaneswar.
It has become a cause of worry for the State’s COVID managers in the wake of detection of the highly transmissible variant in the local community. Over 60% of Omicron variants detected so far are found to be community transmission cases.
On Saturday, 14 Omicron cases were detected while on 5 January, 24 more people had tested positive for Omicron in Odisha. On 21 December, two cases of Omicron were detected in Odisha for the first time, another two were detected on 23 December, four on 26 December, one on 29 December, five on 30 December and 23 on 2 January.
As many as 89 Omicron cases of the cumulative caseload of 103 have been detected in the last ten days.
Meanwhile the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has spread its wings to major parts of the State while the severity of the variant infection has been found to be less than the delta variant, much to the relief of Odisha’s COVID managers.
It is heartening to note that the most of the Omicron infected individuals are not severely infected and majority of them were asymptomatic, said a senior health official adding that samples are being sent for genome sequencing in clusters where the test positivity rate is on a higher side.