BHUBANESWAR: A day after the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) relaxed lockdown norms allowing certain services and business establishments to operate following no report of any Covid case in last 14 days, one person tested positive putting the city back in red zone once again.
The 77-year-old man of Madhusudan Nagar is a close contact of a previous patient (No. 41) who was diagnosed with the disease on April 7.
Two of the contacts of patient 41 had then tested positive and the elderly person tested negative following a test on April 9.
Although he was in home quarantine since then, his samples were collected after he developed symptoms similar to Covid-19. After his test results came on Tuesday, he has been admitted to a Covid hospital.
Director of National Health Mission Shalini Pandit said the person’s health condition was regularly monitored by the health team at State control room.
“One day he called up 104 and informed that he has flu-like symptoms such as fever. Since he wanted another round of test, his swab samples were collected accordingly and he tested positive,” she said.
Stating that the test result depends on the viral load, Pandit said if the shedding of the virus is less, a person may not test positive. In this case, first test result of the person may have come negative as he was in initial stage of infection and there was not sufficient viral load, she clarified.
Patient 41 has so far infected three persons, including a 35-year-old woman and 22-year-old man, both of them his close relatives.
Though two of his contacts (Patient 49 and 50) had visited several places before testing positive, no case of secondary infection had been reported.
While the woman had visited Red Cross Bhawan area and Capital Hospital on April 4 and 6 respectively, the youth had visited relatives at Badahantuda in Banpur between March 18 and 20 and friends and other relatives at Unit-III, Station Square, Satya Nagar and Jharpada from March 20 to April 10. Both had tested positive on April 10.
With detection of a new case in Bhubaneswar, the number of positive cases rose to 47 of which 28 have recovered so far.
Tele-medicine service begins
Tele-medicine services started in Capital Hospital, Bhubaneswar along with other areas including Sambalpur, Khurda, Jagatsinghpur, Balasore, Mayurbhanj, Koraput, Rayagada, Jharsuguda and Subarnapur districts from Wednesday.