In the sharpest single-day spike, the Omicron tally in the coastal State jumped to 37 on Sunday with 23 more, including foreign returnees and community, testing positive for the new variant of coronavirus, said State’s health authorities.
With the reporting of new cases, the cumulative tally has gone up from 14 to 37.
This is the biggest ever spike in Omicron infections in the State after the first cases were reported on 21 December.
The Institute of Life Sciences (ILS)-Bhubaneswar confirmed the detection of 23 new variant cases on the basis of genome sequencing clinical test reports.
ILS-Bhubaneswar Director Ajay Parida confirmed the detection and said “23 Covid-10 infected individuals were detected to have contracted the highly transmissible virus after the genome sequencing of the samples at the institute. Besides the returnees from the foreign countries, the community inhabitants also got infected from the mutant variant”.
Samples of five COVID-19 infectees were genome sequenced and it has given a positive result at the diagnostic test at the Institute of Life Sciences-Bhubaneswar, the senior health department officials said.
The newly infected people have been hospitalized and contact tracing of those who were exposed to the infectees is on to arrest the rise of the mutant variant in the State.
The State had reported five cases on 30 December. On December 26, four foreign returnees, 2 from Nigeria and as many from UAE, had tested positive for the Omicron variant. On December 23, two patients, aged 11 and 15, who recently returned from “non at-risk” country Nigeria, were also found infected.
Prior to that, two patients, aged 41 and 43, had tested positive for the Omicron variant on December 21, after returning to the state from Nigeria and Qatar.