Odisha Registers Sharp Jump In Omicron Cases; Affected Tally Rises To 347

Bhubaneswar: Odisha’s Omicron tally touched 347 on Wednesday with a sharp jump in cases of this variant of COVID-19 as 147 people more testing positive during genome sequencing at the Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar.

The last big jump in cases was on January 12 when 67 samples were found positive. On January 15, the state had reported another 32 new cases.

On January 10, 28 new Omicron cases were detected and among them, 18 had international travel history. Of the cumulative 103 cases then, 83 were detected in the last 10 days.

On January 9, 14 Omicron cases were detected while January 5 saw 24 people testing positive for this variant in the state.

It was on December 21 that the first two cases of Omicron was detected in Odisha and another two were found infected by this variant of COVID-19 on December 23, four on December 26, one on December 29, five on December 30 and 23 on January 2.

Notably, the state has been reporting over 11,000 cases for the last two consecutive days and has 84770 active cases. It received the first lot of TATA MD check OmiSure RT- PCR test kits, which it had ordered earlier this month for detecting the presence of Omicron in samples of people testing COVID-19 positive. These will be used primarily in four cities – Berhampur, Cuttack, Rourkela and Bhubaneswar, and districts with high infection rates.