India's Omicron Cases: All you need to know about two men infected in Karnataka
New Delhi : India found its first two Omicron variant cases in Karnataka in two men – one a foreign return and one local doctor with no travel history.
Both of them were fully vaccinated and had mild symptoms of coronavirus infection. But the major concern is for the man who has tested positive without any travel history, indicating the "possible presence" of virus in the city.
“If there is no travel history, we have to think about possible presence in the community. The travel history probably needs to be checked again,” Dr C Nagaraj, director of the state-run Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases, told The Indian Express.
Meanwhile, it has been learned that one of the two infected person returned to South Africa via Dubai on November 27 after testing negative in Bengaluru. Among the 218 contacts of the doctor, three primary and two secondary contacts have tested positive, they said.
Attributing the detection of Omicron to “aggressive testing”, Karnataka Health Minister Dr K Sudhakar said: “One person, a 66-year-old who came from South Africa on November 20, who was asymptomatic, tested positive after his sample was obtained at the airport. He was in a private hotel. He tested negative on November 23 (and) returned to South Africa on November 27.”
Referring to the second sample, Sudhakar said: “He was symptomatic and had a fever. He tested positive on November 22 and self-isolated. When it was found that his cycle threshold (CT value) was low (and hence viral load was high), his sample was sent for genome sequencing on November 24.”
The doctor and five of his contacts who tested positive have been “isolated in a government hospital and a special watch is being kept”. “Till now, no one has had complications or severity. The symptoms are mild… While dealing with the Delta variant, there were a lot of problems linked to the lungs but we have not seen it in these cases,” he said.
More than two dozen nations have reported Omicron cases so far.
