34 Omicron cases treated at the Delhi government’s Lok Nayak hospital are fully vaccinated
Delhi is right behind Mumbai in the states or union territories with the highest number of Omicron cases. As of Monday, 63 cases of infection by the new variant of concern as detected out of which 52 did not have a history of international travel or any contact with an international traveler.
A senior health department official told The Indian express that district surveillance tracks the contacts of these cases and re-confirm if they had any foreign travel history or has come in contact with any foreign traveler in near future.
Meanwhile, the 34 Omicron cases treated at the Delhi government’s Lok Nayak hospital are fully vaccinated. And 31 out of 34 had a history of foreign travel or contact. Moreover, only 11 out of 63 have a known history of foreign travel or contact indicating a wider community spread of the new variant.
A total of 142 Omicron cases has been detected in Delhi so far and the highly transmissible variant is known for evading existing immunity from vaccination through breakthrough infections even when not resulting in a higher incidence of severe Covid-19 disease.
The health department official further informed that ever since the Covid cases have been manageable the positive samples are run with a CT value less than 25. Omicron variant was detected during genome sequencing to map out the viral genome and ascribe a family to it. The genome sequencing of the Delhi samples was carried out at National Centre for Disease Control, Lok Nayak Hospital, and two-state laboratories at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences.
The cycle threshold value is the number of amplification cycles the sample needs to go through during an RT-PCR test to detect active infection. Since lower, the CT value higher is than the infection load, all samples with a CT value less than 25 needs to be fully sequenced.
Another official mention that earlier all Omicron cases were detected in international travelers, but since last week many are been reported from the community too. Until Monday 52 cases were found in general samples. In one specific case, an individual had no history of travel, no symptoms, and was tested frequently. He was admitted to Lok Nayak hospital the designated center for treatment of Omicron cases, he informed.
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