Gujarat reports first case of Omicron variant of COVID, India’s tally at three

Ahmedabad: A 72-year-old man has been found infected with the Omicron variant of coronavirus in Jamnagar city of Gujarat, days after he arrived in the state from Zimbabwe, a high-risk country, the health department said on Saturday.

This is the third case of Omicron in the country as two persons were earlier found infected with this strain in Karnataka.

Gujarat’s Commissioner of Health Jai Prakash Shivhare confirmed that the man has tested positive for the Omicron variant.

The man had arrived in Gujarat from Zimbabwe on November 28 and had tested positive for coronavirus on December 2, after which his sample was sent for genome sequencing, officials said.

Jamnagar municipal commissioner Vijaykumar Kharadi had said that the sample was sent to Ahmedabad for genome sequencing to ascertain whether he was infected with the Omicron variant.

The man, who hails from Jamnagar, has been living in Zimbabwe since the last many years.

He arrived in the state to meet his father-in-law.

After he got a fever, his doctor advised him to get an RT-PCR test done.

The private laboratory on Thursday informed the civic authorities that his report has come out positive for COVID-19, he said.

After that, the man had been shifted to the isolation ward at the Guru Gobind Singh Government Hospital, Kharadi said.

The district authorities had already started his contact tracing as per protocols, officials said.

The Omicron strain has been marked as a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization (WHO).

According to the Centre, the countries designated as “at-risk” are European countries, including the UK, and South Africa, Brazil, Botswana, China, Mauritius, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Singapore, Hong Kong and Israel.