New cases in IIM Joka go up to 28; containment zone set up

Kolkata: With the number of Covid infected cases among the students of IIM Joka going up to 28 on Saturday, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has decided to set up a containment zone at the campus.

Health department has already sent the samples of the Covid infected students to National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in Kalyani for genome sequencing. The health officials are trying to ascertain the variant of Coronavirus that had infected these students.

Currently, there are no containment zones in the city. After a gap of a couple of months, the city is going to witness a containment zone again. KMC will set up the containment zone in IIM Joka only to restrict the spread of Covid after 28 students tested positive. The civic body has plans to carry out tests within a span of three days for a period of 10 days of the affected as well as 58 other students who have not tested positive but have come in contact with the 28 affected students.

"The students may venture outside the campus for tea or smoking and this may further spread the disease. So we will be creating a containment zone to restrict their movement," Mayor Firhad Hakim said on Saturday. There are 96 odd students who have recently come from different states and among whom 28 have tested COVID positive while 58 have not. The two categories have been kept separately in isolation.

Most of them are asymptomatic and some have mild symptoms. They had to undergo a test before checking into their hostels as per norms and were tested positive. However, they have all had their tests from a private facility and the Health department has collected these samples to do a retest, Hakim added.

Meanwhile, daily Covid cases have jumped to 57 on Saturday from what was registered at 50 on Friday. The figure stood at 42 on Thursday. The Covid positivity rate in Bengal has gone up to 0.69 per cent from what stood at 0.54 per cent on Friday.

Covid fatality rate stands at 1.05 per cent over a period of five weeks while the recovery rate stands at 98.93 per cent. Bengal has been registering no change in the recovery rate for the past many days. The total number of recoveries has so far increased up to 19,97,196. State has so far registered 20,18,820 infected cases till Saturday. As many as 2,51,65,019 samples have been examined so far across the state including 8,258 which were done on Saturday. No Covid death occurred on Saturday as well. Around 21,203 people have so far died in the state due to Covid.