Odisha's COVID-19 tally rose to 12,74,575 on Friday as 1,572 more people, including 309 children, tested positive for the infection, while 20 fresh fatalities pushed the state's coronavirus death toll to 8,838, a health bulletin said.
Khurda district, under which Bhubaneswar falls, recorded the highest number of new cases at 233. Four patients, including a six-year-old boy, succumbed to the infection in Jajpur, while Bhubaneswar, Balasore and Kendrapara recorded three fatalities each. The daily positivity rate stood at 2.3 per cent as 68,239 samples were tested in the last 24 hours.
Daily infections plunged by 41.7 per cent from 2,697 a week ago. The state had registered 1,480 cases and 21 deaths on Thursday. The state now has 14,253 active cases, including 2,922 in Khurda, which is in the red zone. Sundargarh is in the yellow zone with over 1,078 infections.
As many as 3,279 patients recuperated from the disease in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of recoveries to 12,51,431. Fifty-three patients have died due to comorbidities so far, it added. Director of Health, Bijay Mohapatra, said that Omicron is now the dominant COVID-19 variant in the state, replacing the killer Delta strain.
He said that Omicron strain was found in 235 of the 241 COVID-19 positive samples collected from 18 districts between January 27 and February 4 and tested at ILS. Districts from where samples were collected included those like Khurda, Sundargarh and Cuttack, which have reported over 500 cases daily for nearly a month.
Mohapatra said that while BA.2 strain was found in 217 samples, BA.1.1 was detected in 12 samples and BA.1 in six samples. The remaining six were Delta variant. He said that only 25.5 per cent of the samples undergoing genome sequencing on January 10 had tested positive for the Omicron strain, which means it has increased four-fold in a month.
With inputs from PTI.
