A man who had returned to Kolkata from Ireland last week tested positive for COVID 19 following which he was hospitalised on Tuesday, a health department official said. The department is waiting for the genome sequencing report of the 27-year-old man to check if he has been afflicted with the Omicron variant of coronaviruses, he added.
The man who has been working in Dublin, Ireland for the last five years arrived in the city from Manchester via Abu Dhabi and New Delhi. He was admitted to a hospital on Tuesday morning.
He said his genome sequencing report from the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics NIBMG at Kalyani is expected to be completed within 72 hours.
He had tested negative for Covid on December 16 at a lab in Dublin, a day before his flight, and then again on arrival at Delhi airport. He reached Kolkata on December 18 and went straight to his home.
He started having a high-grade fever 103 degrees Fahrenheit or above, along with body ache, malaise and headache, after which a test showed that he was Covid positive, the official said.
The patient said he had been indoors since his arrival in Kolkata, as per the guideline for international travellers which states they have to remain in home isolation for eight days and venture out only after testing negative through an RT-PCR test.
The death toll from West Bengal's Covid 19 increased to 19,688 on Tuesday after 12 more deaths were reported in the last 24 hours, a health department bulletin said.
Three deaths were recorded in Kolkata, North 24 Parganas and Nadia districts, while Hooghly and Birbhum districts had two and one deaths.
The bulletin stated that 440 new cases pushed the state's Covid tally to 16,27, 930.
In the last 24 hours, 451 patients recovered from the disease, taking the total number of cured people to 16,00, 791. The discharge rate was 98.33 per cent.
The number of active cases is 7,451. On Tuesday, a total of 32,871 samples were tested for Covid 19 in West Bengal, taking the total number of clinical examinations to 2,10, 59,843.