India has reported 179 new Covid cases and single death in the last 24 hours, the union health ministry data stated on Saturday, taking the total number of cases to 44.7 million and 5,30,726 deaths so far. The countryu2019s active caseload declined to 2,227 cases.Covid cases are constantly declining across the country with Karnataka reporting 162 active cases while Kerala with 1340 active cases. Maharashtra has 143 active cases, Odisha 94 cases, Rajasthan with 35 cases, Tamil Nadu has 56 active cases; Uttar Pradesh has 19 and West Bengal has 52 active cases.
The country conducted over 1,47,467 tests in the last 24 hours.
Meanwhile, INSACOG under the supervision of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) is keeping a close watch on the Covid situation in the country and continues to do constant genome sequencing to track any new variant.
Besides, surveillance at the hospital level is also going on to monitor influenza-like illness (ILI) and severe acute respiratory illness (SARI) cases.In view of Covid cases surging in China and other parts of the world, the central government has made mandatory Covid-19 tests for all travellers arriving from China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand at Delhi International Airport.
These directions to the state government come at a time when China and other countries are struggling with a surge in infections because of the Omicron BF.7 variant.The union health ministry on Monday said that Covid-19-positive samples collected from sentinel sites revealed the presence of all Omicron variants in the community. The governmentu2019s Integrated Disease Surveillance Program (IDSP) sentinel sites referred 324 Covid-19 positive samples for sequencing to 22 INSACOG labs. The samples were collected from 29 December to 7 January from different sentinel locations.Comment down below.
