NEW DELHI: India recorded a dramatic surge in its Omicron tally by logging more than 200 cases on Wednesday on the back of both Maharashtra and Delhi reporting their highest single-day infections even as regular Covid-19 cases — which, unlike Omicron, can be detected within a day — breached previous daily records in several states.
In what could signal the start of Omicron’s community transmission, many states confirmed that a large number of patients neither had any recent travel history nor were they contacts of the affected patients of the highly transmissible variant.
Wednesday’s tally of 215 Omicron cases is significantly higher than the previous single-day highest count of 135 that India had recorded just two days ago. While Maharashtra recorded 85 cases, taking the state’s total count to 252 (the highest in the country), Delhi followed with 73 infections which took its total count to 238. Delhi and Maharashtra alone account for more than 52% of the total 932 infections in the country. Other states reporting fresh Omicron cases were Rajasthan (23 infections), Gujarat (19), Andhra Pradesh (10) and Bengal (5).
Worryingly, in what could possibly indicate the start of a community transmission, 38 of the 85 fresh cases in Maharashtra neither have a recent travel history nor were they contacts of the Omicron patients. As many as 50% of these cases are from Mumbai.
Similarly, 11 of the 23 infections reported in Rajasthan on Wednesday are in this category. In Bengal, four of the five new Omicron patients reported on Wednesday had no recent foreign travel history. Doctors feared this could be the reason behind the sharp surge in Covid cases in Kolkata and the rest of Bengal in the last 24 hours.
Even though hospital admissions have not surged, labs across Kolkata are witnessing an alarmingly high positivity rate. “A week ago, the Covid positivity rate in our lab was between 5% and 10%. Now, the rate is around 30%,” said Woodlands Multispeciality Hospital MD & CEO Rupali Basu.
