As the country battles with concerns over the new Covid-19 variant Omicron, Maharashtra reported seven new cases of the Omicron variant of coronavirus on Friday including a three-and-half-year-old girl which took the tally of such infections to 17, the state health department said.
Although Mumbai has recorded five positive Omicron cases in the past week, the overall positivity rate is below 1%, with the daily caseload for the Covid-19 cases steady at less than 300 for the last four weeks, reported Hindustan Times.
Meanwhile, officials of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Sunday said that the situation is well under control. Dr Mangla Gomare, the executive health officer in the BMC, said that the daily positivity rate is below 1%, which means that the situation is satisfactory.
“Regularly, more than a thousand samples are collected for RT-PCR tests from the Mumbai airport, out of which only five tested positive now. Most of them are either asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. Not a single patient required oxygen support or ventilation, which clearly shows that the effects of this new variant have not been very intense,” Gomare told HT.
She also added that the intensity of the spread is also not very high as labelled by international experts. “We were told that the rate of transmission of Omicron is very high compared to earlier variants. However, we have tracked all the close contacts and 99% of them were negative. While during the emergence of the delta variant earlier this year, the rate of transmission was much higher as there would be multiple cases in one family,” Gomare said.
Dr Shashank Joshi, a member of the Covid 19 task force in Maharashtra, said that the clinical outcome of the Omicron is mild. “Currently, Omicron in India including Maharashtra and Mumbai is sporadic and travel-related. There is no community transmission or cluster cases reported till now. Even in countries like South Africa, Denmark and the UK, which showed a spike in cases because of this variant, there has been a decline recently,” said Joshi.
“Still, we have a long way to go before coming to any conclusion and keep adhering to Covid-appropriate behaviour,” said Joshi.
On Sunday, 187 fresh cases were reported in Mumbai and a total of 40,031 tests were conducted in the city. A total of two Covid deaths were reported on Sunday and the recovery rate stood at 97%.
Dr Balkrishna Adsul, dean of the Seven Hills Hospital in Andheri East, where the Omicron positive patients are undergoing treatment, said that on Sunday, three out of the five patients were discharged from the hospital.
“At present, we have two patients who have tested positive of Omicron variant undergoing treatment. Both of them have travel history from Tanzania and Nairobi. We are conducting RT-PCR tests of the positive patients after every 10 days, and if the report comes negative, we are discharging them with due care,” said Adsul.
Furthermore, he added that so far 54 patients including the High-Risk-Contacts of the Omicron positive patients were admitted to Seven Hills for treatment as a precautionary measure.
“More than 90 per cent of the close contacts tested negative and those who are positive have very mild symptoms. This is because most of them are vaccinated and younger in age,” Adsul said.
Dr Gautam Bhansali from Bombay Hospital said that at present, there are two suspected Omicron patients admitted to his hospital. “One of the patients have no symptoms at all and another person lost the sense of smell. We have sent their samples for genome sequencing and the report for the same is expected to arrive on Monday or Tuesday,” said Bhansali.
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