Odisha Has High Number Of Asymptomatic Covid-19 Patients: Expert

Bhubaneswar: With Odisha ramping up Covid-19 testing and relatively reporting a higher number of daily positive cases, Ashok Mohapatra, former director of AIIMS Bhubaneswar believes that the State has a large number of asymptomatic patients.

“The Corona uptrend indicates presence of a large number of asymptomatic patients in the State. More aggressive test will bring out more positive cases to fore. So there is no need to panic,” Mohapatra said.

If the testing data in the past three days is analysed, it indicates that the number positive cases are increasing with hike in testing rate. On August 13, as many as 42,761 samples were tested of which 1977 samples came out positive. On August 14, as many as 2496 samples tested positive of the total 47887 tests. A day after, of the 52,795 Covid-19 samples which were tested for the SARS-nCoV, 2924 came out positive.

The State government on Sunday said that around 1 lakh tests have been conducted in the last 2 days. Ganjam district leads the tests with 14,953 tests in two days, which is more than many states in the country. The total number of tests in the State meanwhile is nearing one-million mark.

“Earlier about 250 to 300 tests were being conducted in Jajpur per day which has now been enhanced by 10 times to 2500. So the number of positive cases have increasing proportionally,” district Collector Ranjan Kumar Das said.

The data shared by the State health authorities also revealed that 11 districts reported 100 plus cases on Sunday. Among the districts, the number of positive cases in Khordha, Ganjam and Jajpur are alarming. Khordha reported the highest number of 488 cases, followed by Ganjam with 318 cases and Jajpur 200 cases on the day.

However, the good news is that the positivity rate continues to fall in Ganjam. As per the State government, the positivity rate in the district has now slumped to 3.6% which is a huge improvement in the situation of the district compared to few weeks back.

The former AIIMS director opined that apart from strict enforcement of Covid-19 safety norms, Ganjam model of strategy should be adopted in those districts which are logging more than 100 daily cases.

“The number of patients in other districts is also increasing. If we adopt the strategy adopted in Ganjam, we can control the pandemic,” Mohapatra added.

On the other hand, the Covid-19 claimed 10 more lives in the State in the last 24 hours. While two persons each died in Ganjam and Bhubaneswar, one each died in Bolangir, Bhadrak, Sonepur, Kandhamal, Cuttack and Jajpur. With this, the death toll due to the virus in the State has mounted to 343.

According to the State government, the positivity rate in the state has come down from 9.2% a month back to 5.5% on August 16. The fatality rate in Odisha continues to be among the lowest in the country at around 0.58%.

(Edited By Suryakant Jena)

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COVID-19: Odisha Records Highest Single-Day Spike Of 2924 Cases, Death Toll 343