28 students among 31 more test COVID-19 positive in Ahmednagar school

Twenty-eight more students and three staff members of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district have tested positive for COVID-19, taking the number of such cases at the institute to 82 in the last one week, a health department official said.

According to the official, a majority of the infected students are ”asymptomatic” and currently admitted to hospital, where their health condition is stable.

”We had sent repeat swab samples of some students, who had earlier tested negative, for analysis as they showed some symptoms (of coronavirus). Last night, the samples of 19 students returned positive and today 12 more samples tested positive (three of them of staff members and bringing total new cases to 31),” said Dr Prakash Lalge, health officer of Parner tehsil in the adjoining district.

Of the total 82 patients, 6 are staff members of the school.

Ahmednagar district collector Rajendra Bhosale on Sunday evening said the school campus has been declared a ‘containment zone’ after detection of cases among students and staff members.

”As a precautionary measure, we have deployed a medical team comprising a doctor and two nurses to monitor other students in the campus,” he had said.

The administration had said the samples of all the students who tested positive were sent for genome sequencing to ascertain if any of them had been infected by the new variant of coronavirus Omicron.

The school, part of the Navodaya Vidyalaya network that comes under the Union education ministry, is located at Takali Dhokeshwar village.