Bhubaneswar: Odisha’s COVID-19 tally breached the 28,000-mark on Tuesday with 1,215 new cases, and the death toll climbed to 154 as seven more patients, including a five-year-old boy, succumbed to the infection, a Health department official said.
The state’s virus caseload now stands at 28,107. While 753 cases have been reported from different quarantine centres, the remaining 462 are local contacts.
As many as 687 people were discharged from hospitals on Tuesday. The total recovery now stands at 18,061, which is 64.25 per cent of the total caseload.
The number of active cases stands at 9,857.
The fresh fatalities were reported from four districts. Ganjam reported three deaths, two were reported from Rayagada district and one each from Khurda and Cuttack, the official said.
The five-year-old boy from Bhubaneswar was suffering from cerebral palsy with seizure disorder, and he is the youngest COVID-19 victim in the state, while the oldest was a 72-year-old man from Rayagada who had diabetes.
A 45-year-old man from Cuttack who died was suffering from bronchial asthma and diabetes.
The official said a 16-year-old girl died in Balasore, but the cause of her death was acute lymphocytic leukaemia with immune suppression.
With this, the number of COVID-positive people who died of other diseases increased to 35 in Odisha, the official added.
Of the 154 fatalities, Ganjam district accounted for the highest number of 85 deaths, followed by Khurda at 19, Cuttack 11, Gajapati 9, Sundergarh and Rayagada with six each, two each in Angul, Balasore, Bhadrak, Jagatssinghpur, Kendrapara and Puri, and one each from Malkangiri, Nayagarh, Kandhamal, Jajpur, Jharsuguda and Bargarh.
Odisha’s coronavirus hotspot Ganjam reported the highest number of 332 cases, followed by Khurda (312), Gajapati (89), Keonjhar (77) and Koraput (73).
Khurda district recorded the highest single-day spike of 312 cases on Tuesday.
The state conducted 9,113 swab sample tests on Monday, taking the total number of coronavirus tests to 4,76,560.
Meanwhile, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Tuesday inaugurated the state’s second plasma bank at the state-run Capital Hospital here and announced that another such facility would be made operational at the Ispat General Hospital at Rourkela on Wednesday.
Two other plasma banks will soon come up at government hospitals in Burla and Berhampur in phases, the chief minister said.
He also launched a portal in which volunteers can register their names for plasma donation.
After Ganjam, Khurda district, comprising Bhubaneswar, has also turned out to be another hotspot. As many as 215 more people tested positive for the virus since Monday, which pushed the case tally to 2,365.
The district administrations of Gajapati, Nuapada and Kandhamal imposed restrictions on movement of people in view of the surge of the positive cases.
The state government has also decided to allow the cremation of bodies of COVID-19 suspects without waiting for their test reports to avoid delay in the conduct of last rites, officials said.