Barabanki district in Uttar Pradesh, which till two weeks ago was a district with no active coronavirus cases, on Wednesday reported 95 Covid-19 cases—the highest single-day surge in a UP district.
Notably, out of the people who tested positive Wednesday, 49 are migrant workers who had returned to the district in the past few weeks.
The remaining 46 people are possible contacts of the six persons who had tested positive earlier.
“According to information received on Wednesday, out of the 245 samples sent for testing on May 15 and 16, the report of 95 came out to be positive. There is no need to panic. The numbers are not important, but the fact is we had identified these people and were successful in stopping further spread of the virus,” Barabanki District Magistrate Adarsh Singh tweeted.
The district has now 122 active cases, he added.
The report of a surge in coronavirus cases comes a day after Basti reported 44 new cases—all migrants who had returned from Pune in Maharashtra, a hotspot.
Uttar Pradesh has been reporting a jump in coronaviruscases for the last few days.
While the government initially attributed the inflection to ramping up of testing—the daily average of samples being tested has increased to 6,000—it later admitted that the rising number of returning migrants is a cause for concern.
Principal Secretary (Health) Amit Mohan Prasad had said on Tuesday that the test-positivity rate among the migrants could be as high as 22% vis-a-vis around 2.6% overall test-positivity rate.
Meanwhile, the total number of coronavirus cases in Uttar Pradesh crossed 5,000 on Wednesday with four more deaths being reported over a 24-hour-period.