By Our Correspondent
BHUBANESWAR: With reports of single day’s record in death toll and positive cases, the COVID-19 onslaught continued to give sleepless nights to Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik with State Health and Family Welfare Department briefing the latest trend.
With fresh 12 deaths in a single days, Odisha’s tally was on Friday reached at 247 just 3 short to 250 while with another single day’s record of 1833, positive cases also reached at a all time high at 42,550 and closely approaching towards 50,000 mark.
Odisha so far conducted cumulative Tested of 6, 16, 646 and out of which 42,550 found positive while 26,887 have been recovered after treatment and 15,370 were still in active.
Interestingly, Naveen Patnaik’s home turf, herein lies another of Ganjam’s dubious distinctions: it is one of the rare non-Capital districts to bear the highest caseload in Odisha. In most Indian States, the district that houses the Capital city has been the worst-affected. Ganjam’s positive cases have already crossed 10,000 mark while death toll too chasing 130 mark and just few short of it.
Out of the around 5,50,000 people who have returned to Odisha since lockdown rules were relaxed to allow Inter-State movement of stranded people, the final destination of almost 4,00,000 of them was Ganjam.
A study carried out in the Bhubaneswar based Institute of Life Sciences had thrown up a startling revelation: the strain of the virus in Ganjam was “highly infectious and very virulent” compared to other three strains that the state could isolate.
It was a strain that people who had come from Surat and Ahmedabad had brought in.On the other hand, the strain returnees from Bengal got in was much less infectious – even family members were not getting infected.More than 2 lakh returnees of the 4 lakh who came to Ganjam were from Gujarat,” he said. The positivity rate among them was very high.But migrant workers from Ganjam were infected in Surat and only then allowed to return. No surprise that now these workers’ villages, families are infected too and Ganjam is raging.
But many residents say there were lapses in enforcing institutional quarantine. Many people purportedly would sneak out and spend the night at home. Some conceded that there had been slips. As opposed to other districts, some people in Ganjam did not follow the administration’s directives strictly.
