BHUBANESWAR: Amid growing concern over the Omicron variant, Odisha recorded 69 per cent spike in new Covid cases in the last 24 hours. The State reported 255 new infections on Wednesday against 151 a day before.
Sources said fresh cases that had come down following a drop in testing shot up significantly as the number of tests went up by around 25 per cent. As many as 58,906 tests, including 21,213 through RT-PCR were conducted during the period. The sudden rise in the number of infections were reported from six districts apart from Khurda, which has been witnessing 80 to 150 cases a day for over a month now.
With 106 cases, Khurda contributed around 40 per cent of the caseload followed by 18 from Sundargarh. The cases rose from three to 22 in Mayurbhanj, six to 19 in Sambalpur, six to 16 in Jajpur, one to 14 in Angul and six to 12 in Cuttack.
The State has been seeing an uptick in the number of Covid cases in recent days. While the daily cases had soared to 335 on November 25, the count stood at 270 on December 3 and came down to 105 on December 6.
Health authorities said multiple clusters have been reported from educational institutions across the State leading to the spike in cases. They claimed even though there has been a rise in cases in several places, including Bhubaneswar, there has been no substantial increase in the number of hospitalisations.
Director of Public Health Dr Niranjan Mishra said severe cases too have been rare, with the majority of those testing positive showing mild to no symptoms. “As many as 982 people have arrived in Odisha from eight at-risk countries so far. They are being tracked by the district teams. Four positive samples have been sent for genome sequencing,” he added.