BHUBANESWAR: Odisha witnessed an uptick in new Covid cases after two days with 542 infections and one death reported in last 24 hours taking the active tally to 3,270 and toll to four. This was the highest number of daily cases in the last eight months. The fresh cases spread across 26 districts were detected from 7,571 samples.
As the number of tests rose from a range of 5,000 to 7,000, the test positivity rate remained at 7.15 per cent. Health department sources said the new cases breached the 500 mark for the second time this week.
As many as 502 new cases were detected on Sunday. Though health officials did not divulge district-wise case details, sources said, five districts including Sundargarh, Cuttack and Nabarangpur accounted for 70 per cent of the caseload.
The infection is spreading fast in all five districts with Sundargarh topping the list with close to 200 daily cases. Most of the cases in western Odisha districts are from border areas. One person with comorbidities from Sundargarh district succumbed to the disease during treatment.
Recently, new sub-lineages XBB with additional mutations- XBB.2.3 and XBB.2.3.2, have been detected in Odisha along with the highly infective Omicron sub-variant XBB.1.16.Scientists alerted the new sub-lineages are among the top circulating variants in the country accounting for around five per cent of cases though XBB.1.16 is still the dominant strain.