2 Covid positive found in Indore the siblings were international arrivals

INDORE: Amid rising concerns over the Omicron variant of coronavirus, a 14-year-old girl and her eight-year-old brother have tested positive for COVID-19 after getting back from Nigeria five days back, a health official said on Saturday.

Their samples are being sent for genome sequencing, he said. The siblings, who were found infected, had gone to Nigeria with their mother to fulfill their father and returned to Indore on December 6 via Delhi, said Dr. Amit Malakar, nodal officer for COVID-19 within the district.

Their father works in Nigeria, while they bear their mother in Indore, he said. “Although the mother of the 2 children wasn’t found infected with coronavirus, we’ve got taken her sample for re-examination as a precaution,” he said. Malakar said that after the test reports, the infected siblings are admitted to a hospital and their samples are being sent to Delhi’s National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) for genome sequencing to grasp whether or not they are carrying the Omicron strain.

While South Africa remains the epicenter of the Omicron variant outbreak, these cases are confirmed in a minimum of eight other African countries – Botswana, Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. The central government, while expressing concern over the decline in usage of face masks within the country, had on Friday said that the all-India tally of Omicron variant cases has gone up to 32.

Updated by Yukta Daswani