STATE TIMES NEWS
Mumbai/Panaji: India’s tally of the highly contagious Omicron variant of COVID on Thursday crossed 1,000 on the back of Maharashtra reporting its highest single-day infection with the new strain, as states further tightened measures to deal with the surge in coronavirus cases.
Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain, meanwhile, said Omicron is gradually spreading in the community and the variant of concern has been found in 46 per cent of the latest samples of regular COVID cases analysed in the national capital.
The Goa government has decided to test for COVID all international passengers, including those travelling from ‘non-high risk’ countries on their arrival at the airport while West Bengal is to suspend all direct flights from the UK and other ‘high-risk’ countries from January 3.
According to the latest data available from the Centre and the states in the night, the total number of Omicron cases in the country was around 1,200.
Maharashtra reported 198 new cases of the Omicron variant, including 190 in Mumbai alone, the state health department said in a release. With this, the tally of these cases in the state rose to 450.
Of the 198 Omicron cases reported by the National Institute of Virology(NIV) during the day, only 30 have recent international travel history, the release said.
While the daily rise in COVID cases crossed the 13,000 mark after around 49 days, the country also recorded the highest single day rise of Omicron infections with 180 fresh cases, taking the total of those infected with the new strain to 961, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated at 8 am. It was not clear whether the total number of COVID cases included the Omicron variant.