By Our Correspondent
BHUBANESWAR: Odisha seems fighting its toughest battle to contain the spread of COVID-19 but reports from State Health and Family Welfare Department, has sent shock wave across the State with tally of positive cases reach at 245. The fresh cases include 19 from Ganjam,5 from Kendrapara and 2 from Bhadrak districts.Out of 245 cases in the state, 181 are active while have 62 patients have so far recovered. Meanwhile, 2 patients have died of the virus till Friday.
“19 cases in Ganjam are all males aged 26, 45, 21, 38, 40, 33, 45, 31, 23, 47, 35,24, 30,18, 29, 57, 38, 31 and 58 years. Two patients of Bhadrak are a 21-year-old youth and 41-year-old man. Five cases in Kendrapara are all males aged 32, 33, 27 35 and 31. All are Surat returnees and most of them were are symptomatic,” sources said.
The 2 Bhadrak patients belong to Dhamnagar block and Basudevpur Municipality area and are returnees of Gujarat. In Kendrapara, the 5 new patients are from Mahakalpada, Pattamundai and Marshaghai areas.
With the new cases, Ganjam has total 47 confirmed cases (all active) becoming the second district with highest number of active cases. The tally of Bhadrak now stands at 23, including 11 active cases while Kendrapara has total 8 cases including six active patients.
Total 2460 samples were tested on Thursday. It is pertinent to mention here that Odisha reported the highest number of positive cases in a single day yesterday with 40 new patients. Ganjam has reported 47 cases in just six days with the first case reported on May 3. Over 100 cases have been reported in the last eight days while the doubling rate has reduced to 10 days.
Reportedly, all cases were sypmptomatic and all persons except one have recently returned from Surat.Out of 19 new positive cases in Ganjam today, 18 are Surat returnees and ‘one’ is Kerala returnee.While several measures are being taken by the Odisha government to contain the virus, district administrations are on their toes as they launch contact tracing.
