BHUBANESWAR: Good news for Odisha people on the occasion of New Year as the samples of UK returnees sent for genome sequencing did not find any UK mutant strain of Covid-19. Pradipta Kumar Mohapatra, additional chief secretary (health), said this in Bhubaneswar on Friday.
The state government’s heath team has taken samples of almost all persons who had returned from the UK last month.
“Only four returnees and three of their contacts have tested positive for Covid-19 out of around 220 samples. It’s a good thing that no UK Covid variant is detected from the positive samples of the returnees,” he added.
The state government had aggressively conducted Covid testing of UK returnees and contact tracing of positive cases returned from the UK. A total of 184 persons had returned from the UK. The government has traced almost all the returnees and collected samples from them for Covid testing. Even 44 contacts of these returnees have undergone Covid testing.
Infectivity capacity of the new variant of Covid-19 detected in the UK during the last week of September is very high. So, different countries across the globe are taking all precautionary measures to prevent spreading of this mutant strain.
Meanwhile, 245 new Covid-19 positive cases have been reported from the state in last 24 hours. Three patients, including a 22-year-old youth from Nabarangapur died of Covid while undergoing treatment.
The state’s total number of positive cases was 3, 29,866 on Friday. At present the state has 2505 active cases. Another 329 Covid patients have recovered in the last 24 hours taking the total number of recovery to 3, 25,432.
Ganjam district, which was badly hit by the virus a few months ago, has reported zero positive case on Friday. Similarly, five other districts- Koraput, Malkangiri, Nabarangapur, Gajapati and Puri- have also reported zero Covid cases. Sambalpur registered the highest number of cases of 35 followed by 34 from Sundargarh and 32 from Angul.