A 31-year-old student of the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, who returned to the campus from the United States (US) tested positive for Covid-19, college administration said on Monday.
Following an RTPCR report which confirmed the student’s status as positive on Sunday, the student and his colleague were quarantined at the campus, they said.
“Two research scholars returned to India from Chicago on January 1 and arrived at the campus on January 4. As per the standard SOP, all students coming from outside, especially those from abroad, have to remain in quarantine for seven days,” said Ram Manohar, IIT-ISM security officer.
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“After some initial symptoms of light fever and cough, an RTPCR test of both students was conducted and one tested positive, following which both were quarantined,” he added.
Dhanbad district surveillance officer Dr Rajkumar Singh said the test sample of the Covid positive student will be sent for genome sequencing.
Following a Covid case, the college administration said they sent a disclaimer to all students and staff, who might have come in contact with the two US returnees directly or indirectly, to volunteer for an RTPCR test.
Covid-19 numbers in the state have remained almost negligible. Including the Dhanbad case, there are only two active cases in Jharkhand, as per the latest health medical bulletin of the health department.
According to the data of the ministry of health updated Monday, in the past 24 hours, 170 new Covid-19 infections and one death were recorded in India while the active cases declined to 2,371, as compared to 2,423 cases reported a day earlier.
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The highly infectious XBB subvariant of Omicron that drove the recent Covid-19 surge in Singapore continues to circulate in India, with around 15% of the samples sequenced in recent weeks found the subvariant. However, there was no reason to panic as there has been no unusual surge in cases reported from any part of the country, experts say.
Meanwhile, Adar Poonawalla, CEO, Serum Institute of India, has said their Covovax vaccine will get approval as a booster dose against Covid-19 in the next 10 to 15 days. Poonawalla told the media that the vaccine works very well against the Omicron variant of coronavirus.
