Three COVID-19 positive cases including a 20-year-old woman and an adolescent boy have been reported in West Bengal at a time when India has recorded a slight spike in the number of cases in nine states over the past week.
Sources in the state health department said that two COVID-affected cases were reported in the Mograhat area of South 24-Parganas recently. Their nasal swab samples were tested positive through RT-PCR tests conducted at the state-run Diamond Harbour Medical College and Hospital.
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Earlier, during the first week of this month a woman was tested COVID positive and admitted to a premier private hospital in the Alipore area, sources said. She was rushed to the hospital showing symptoms of breathing trouble and other chronic ailments and treated in an isolation ward of the hospital for one week and then she was discharged.
“Showing common flu-like symptoms three COVID cases were reported during routine surveillance programmes. All of them are at home and there is nothing to panic about the viral disease,” Narayan Swarup Nigam, principal secretary in charge of the state health department, told The Statesman on Saturday.
With slight rise in the number of novel coronavirus cases in states like Kerala, Delhi, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Sikkim the Delhi government on Friday has issued an advisory sensitising people about the viral disease.
There has been an increase COVID cases in several southeast Asian countries also besides the nine states in India though experts say numbers in India remain low with neither worrying trends nor any new variants of concern yet.
The country’s count of active Covid-19 cases rose from 93 on 12 May to 257 on 19 May, according to union health ministry data, with case counts rising in the nine states.
The surge in cases has also been recorded in Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand in recent weeks largely because of various successors of omicron, the Covid-19 variant that swept across the world during the pandemic in 2021-2022.
Experts felt that there is no evidence to suggest that the virus has evolved to cause more severe illness despite modest hike in cases in India. The “zero” active cases in several states may reflect a lack of testing rather than an absence of infections, according to them.
“The variant in Hong Kong is NB.1.8.1, which is a combination of XDV and JN.1. XDV has evolved from XBB, and JN.1 has evolved from BA.2. All are derivatives of omicron variants such as XBB or JN.1 that have widely circulated in India in the past,” one of the experts said.