Fresh COVID-19 cases continued to be reported in the State with four more persons testing positive for the deadly disease late on Saturday night.
This takes the total number of coronavirus cases to 54 barely some hours after National Health Mission (NHM) Director Shalini Pandit gave some relaxing news.
The Health and Family Welfare Department in its official twitter post confirmed that four persons Saturday tested positive to the highly infectious virus. Of these four cases, two are from Bisra town in Sundargarh district while one case each was reported from Rajnagar in Kendrapada district and Bhubaneswar.
The two cases from Sundargarh district are that of two males and have a Nizamuddin Markaz link. Both were on quarantine in the Rourkela COVID-19 Hospital.
The district administration and police officials on Sunday morning sealed Bisra town. Entry points at Dareikela, Puruna Bisra, Budheljar and Santoshpur were blocked to restrict movement of people in and out of the area. Fire Services personnel were engaged to disinfect the area.
A meeting between the district Collector and SP was held to take a decision regarding imposition of shutdown in Bisra town.
The woman patient of Rajnagar in Kendrapada district has a travel history to West Bengal. On March 29, she returned with her father and another person from Kolkata. Later, she and her father were in home quarantine.
Meanwhile, she has been shifted to the Ashwini Hospital in Cuttack and her father, mother and brother are in home quarantine. The swab samples of the family members were collected and sent for testing. Two villages in the area have been declared as containment zones and a disinfection drive was carried out. A door-to door screening of the nearly 150 households of the area was also carried out, said Kendrapada Collector Samarth Verma on Sunday.
Notably, this is the second COVID-19 case in the district. Earlier, a 32-year-old man of the district, who had returned from Dubai, tested positive for the virus.
With the four new case s, the number of COVID-19-affected persons in the State has increased to 54. The number of active cases stood at 41 as 12 persons were cured and discharged from hospitals while an elderly man has died of the coronavirus.
Of the total 3,551 samples tested so far, 3,497 tested negative while 54 samples gave positive result to the COVID-19.