COVID-19 News Updates

Of the 23 Omicron patients, 11 have definite travel history and the rest 12 don’t have any travel history. Some are contracting the virus locally. In Keonjhar district, seven patients have contracted the virus from congregation.

The Omicron variant, harbouring up to 36 mutations in spike protein, is known to evade vaccine efficacy.

The Indian Council of Medical Research also said recently that all Covid vaccines do not prevent infection and are primarily disease-modifying.

"Last two years of experience shows that we can fight Covid with mask and the Covid appropriate behaviour... we will fight this variant too."

According to Prof Agarwal, who bases his predictions of the epidemic on the basis of his mathematical model, the third wave will come in India in January and in March, 1.8 lakh cases can come daily.

However, referring to the Omicron surge in the US as a "tsunami", Fauci also cautioned the public not to be fooled by preliminary data suggesting the variant lacks the severity of earlier Covid-19 variants, such as Delta.

As many as 35 vaccination centres have been opened for the inoculation of 15 to 18 year olds in Bhubaneswar, the State capital of Odisha.

An increase of 22,781 cases has been recorded in the active COVID-19 caseload in a span of 24 hours.

The second worst hit country in terms of cases is India (34,889,132 infections and 481,770 deaths), followed by Brazil (22,297,427 infections and 619,401 deaths).

There will be a slight delay in the vaccination of class 10 and 12 students due to their exams. The students of these classes can take the jab after January 8 and January 12, respectively, informed officials after the meeting.

Paramilitary force officials said that amid the rising number of Omicron cases, all the forces have been asked strictly adhere to Covid-19 protocols in all units and field formations.

Research from an Imperial College London study and Scottish paper Early Pandemic Evaluation and Enhanced Surveillance of Covid-19, states that people with Omicron are 15 to 20 per cent less likely to need hospital treatment.

As per the State Health Department, all the samples were sent for genome sequencing at the Institute Of Life Sciences (ILS), Bhubaneswar.

The nationwide Omicron infection tally has increased to 1,525, of which 560 have been discharged from hospitals.

Of the total new positives, the maximum 177 cases were detected from Khordha, followed by 45 from Cuttack, 38 from Sundargarh, 15 from Jharsuguda. The lone death case from the virus infection was reported from Khordha district.