Odisha logs 10,856 new Covid-19 cases, Omicron tally mounts to 202

Odisha's COVID-19 caseload mounted to 11,22,735 on Saturday with 10,856 fresh infections, while two more fatalities pushed the death toll to 8,478, the Health Department said in a bulletin.

The state also reported 32 new Omicron cases taking the tally of the new strain of coronavirus in Odisha to 202, a health department official said.

The daily test positivity rate jumped to 14.49 per cent from 13.57 per cent the previous day, when 10,273 coronavirus cases were reported, the bulletin said.

Khurda district, where the state capital Bhubaneswar is located, reported over a quarter of the new cases at 3,087, followed by 1,943 in Sundargarh, 909 in Cuttack, and 500 in Sambalpur.

As many as 1,021 children tested positive for the infection out of the 74,936 samples tested in the past 24 hours, the bulletin said.

Odisha now has 61,809 active cases, while 10,52,395 patients have recovered from the disease so far, including 2,216 since Friday, the bulletin said.

Fifty-three other COVID-19 patients who died in the state to date had comorbidities, the bulletin said.

The Institute of Life Sciences (ILS), Bhubaneswar, informed the state health and family welfare department about the detection of the new Omicron cases after genome sequencing of the samples.

The 32 new Omicron cases were detected from genome sequencing of 42 samples, indicating a positivity ratio of the new variant of coronavirus at 76 per cent.

During the last genome sequencing of samples, drawn from nine districts between December 29 and January 9, 74.5 per cent of the samples were found infected with the Delta variant while the remaining 25.5 per cent were of the Omicron strain.

ILS director, Ajay Parida, had earlier told journalists that the Delta variant was the dominant variant in the state, but Omicron sub-type BA.2 was fast replacing it in the state.

The ILS is the lone laboratory in the state where genome sequencing facility is available.

The highly transmissible variant of coronavirus was first detected in Odisha on December 21.

Public Health Director Niranjan Mishra said that 1,100 coronavirus patients, comprising less than two per cent of the active cases, are hospitalised currently, out of which around 350-360 are in the ICU.

Meanwhile, AIIMS Bhubaneswar will suspend the outpatient department (OPD) services from Monday as many staff and students have contracted the virus within a week.

The OPD will be functional only for those who have registered online and for all emergency cases, the institute said.