Crowds seen in queue for Covid testing at the IGI airport in New Delhi on Thursday. (Express Photo: Tashi Tobgyal) Even with coronavirus infections shooting up in Delhi, no fresh case of the Omicron variant was added to the official tally released by the Union Health Ministry Friday. So far, Delhi has reported 465 cases of the Omicron variant, which is still second only to Maharashtra, that has seen 876 cases of the new variant, and recorded 79 cases in the last 24 hours.
The reason for adding only one case over the last two days could be that results of genome sequencing are released in bulk. The city had added 82 Omicron cases to its tally on Wednesday.
Delhi Health Minister Satyendra Jain said earlier this week that not all positive samples were being sequenced as the new variant was already spreading in the community, and Delhi was recording an extremely high number of cases. For about four months, Delhi was sequencing all positive samples as the daily number of cases had remained below 100.
As the cases started shooting up, Jain said that 81 per cent of the samples sequenced during the New Year weekend tested positive for Omicron. One of the labs confirmed that 80 per cent of the Omicron cases did not have a history of international travel or contact with an international traveller. Now, 300 to 400 samples from across the city are being sequenced.
Delhi reported 15,097 new cases of Covid-19 on Thursday with a positivity rate of over 15 per cent. The city has also seen an uptick in the number of deaths due to the infection. Jain, however, said none of the deaths were due to the new variant.
The increase in cases has resulted in a high active case load; there are 31,498 infected persons in the national capital. And, of them, 1,091 are in hospitals.
During the previous Delta wave in April-May last year, when active cases were about 30,000, there were over 6,000 people in hospitals when the wave was on an ascent and over 10,500 when it was waning.
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