Cases of infection by the Omicron variant rose to 961 across India on Thursday

Dec. 30: India reported 13,154 new COVID-19 cases and 268 deaths in the last 24 hours, the health ministry said, with urban centres reporting a big jump. It was the highest number of daily infections since October. Cases of infection by the Omicron variant on Thursday rose to 961 from 781 on Wednesday across India.

The variant of concern that was first detected in South Africa has now spread to 22 states in the country. Delhi has the highest Omicron count with 263 cases, followed by Maharashtra with 252 cases. Gujarat has 97 cases, while Kerala and Telangana have reported 65 and 62 cases respectively.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation’s(WHO) chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that the Omicron variant is very transmissible and is leading to a tsunami of COVID cases.

The recent rise in infections is due to the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. According to data from GISAID, an open-access portal for genomic data on viruses, Omicron has become the dominating variant in India. In the last few days of December, the Omicron variant was found in about 60% of the samples sequenced in India.