News Stardom : kolkata, 21st. December 2021. The state’s sixth patient with history of travel from a high risk-country awaiting genome sequencing report for the Omicron variant of Covid is admitted at Woodlands Hospital.
The 27-year-old man who has been working in Dublin, Ireland, for the last five years, arrived in the city on Friday flying from Manchester via Abu Dhabi and New Delhi. He got admitted to Woodlands on Tuesday morning and his swab sample was immediately sent to The School of Tropical Medicine.
The report from the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani (NIBMG) is expected latest by 72 hours.
The patient had tested negative for Covid on December 16 at a local lab at Dublin, a day before his flight, and then again upon arrival at Delhi airport. He reached Kolkata on December 18 evening and went straight to his home. From Monday morning, however, he started running a high-grade fever along with body ache, malaise and headache, after which a test showed that he was Covid positive.
“The patient got admitted at Woodlands on Tuesday morning as it is imperative for Covid positive patients with international travel to stay in institutional quarantine, and not home isolation. We are following all protocols, including strict isolation, for the patient. He is hemodynamically stable and does not have fever or any other discomfort at the moment,” said Dr Rupali Basu, Managing Director & CEO, Woodlands Multispeciality Hospital.
According to doctors, the patient has said he had been indoors since his arrival in Kolkata, as per the guideline for international travellers which says they have to remain in home isolation for eight days, undergo another RT-PCR and test negative before venturing out.
How does genome sequencing to test for Omicron work?
In genome sequencing, the throat/ nasal swab of the patient is examined, just like the RT-PCR test. NGS or Next-Generation Sequencing that is now used analyses the genes present in the swab sample and tries to match them to the structure of the Omicron variant, which is a mutation of the original Sars-CoV-2 variant. If the mutation is detected, the patient is deemed to be Omicron positive.
Be First to Comment