Still unexplained
The hunt for the origins of Covid-19 has for the past four years been a tangled web of politics, power struggles, and international finger-pointing.
While the entire world is scared of Covid-19’s new variant Omicron, Bihar has no facility to conduct genome sequencing at the moment.
A test lab of genome sequencing is available only in Patna’s Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS) but it is lacking a reagent to conduct a test. Such a situation emerged after some samples of Covid-positive patients who came from foreign countries, were sent to IGIMS for testing.
The Bihar Health department has now given an order to buy the reagent which will take at least 15 days to arrive. This means the testing of genome sequencing in Bihar will start only after 15 days.
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Genome sequencing is a process to analyse the nature of all kinds of viruses a patient is infected with. The Omicron or Delta variant of the coronavirus can be detected only through genome sequencing.
Meanwhile, Mangal Pandey, Bihar Health Minister claimed that there is no case of Omicron in the state.
The claim made by the Minister came at a time when five patients who came from African countries and two from Dubai have been found to be Covid-positive during an RT-PCR test. Their samples were sent to IGIMS for genome sequencing. As the reagent is not available in the lab, the samples are preserved in cold storage.
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