84 students from 2 Odisha institutes test Covid positive

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BHUBANESWAR: At least 53 students of a high school in Sundargarh district and 31 medical students of Vimsar, Burla, in Sambalpur district tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday.
While the medical students have been advised home isolation, authorities have decided to close the high school for a week. The detection of multiple cases from educational institutions comes at a time when the government is mulling restart of offline teaching for classes I to V, raising concern among health experts.
The infected school students are from government-aided St Mary Girls High School and used to stay in the hostel. The health condition of the affected is stable with none requiring hospitalisation so far.
Sundargarh Pavan Kalyan said from 600 students of classes VIII to X who stay in the hostel, 53 have tested positive. “We have launched contact tracing to find out from where the students have contracted the virus. They were wearing masks in school. Recently they had returned from home. We want the school operations to continue normally. Also, all teaching and non-teaching staff have tested negative. The nearby shop owners who the students interact with have also tested negative for the virus,” Kalyan said.
School sources said an inmate of the hostel developed some symptoms after which her swab sample was taken. She tested positive. The school authorities then took the samples of all the inmates and 52 returned positive. The students have mild or no symptoms. They have been segregated from the rest of the students to check further spread. The school authorities sanitized the campus of the hostel and school. A team of doctors also visited the hostel.
At Vimsar, the infected medical students have been shifted to the isolation ward of the Covid-19 hospital there. A first year MBBS student first tested positive three days ago. Subsequently, the student was shifted to the isolation ward. Later, during contact tracing, samples of around 180 students were collected from three hostels for testing. The 31 infected students are from first and second year MBBS.
Vimsar superintendent Lalmohan Nayak said all the students who have been tested positive have received both doses of Covid-19 vaccines. “Most of the students are asymptomatic,” he added.
The Vimsar authorities have sought permission from Sambalpur district administration to put three hostels of the institution under micro containment.

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