In the steepest single-day spike of the Omicron variant, 67 more people tested positive for the infection in Odisha with the tally of the COVID-19 variant climbing to 170 Wednesday, an official said.
The cases were detected from over 350 samples sent for genome sequencing. The new infectees included people with foreign travel history and local transmission cases, said an official of the 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.
While on Monday 28 cases were diagnosed, 14 Omicron cases were detected on Saturday last. 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.
The majority of Omicron cases of the cumulative caseload of 170 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.