Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and state Home Minister Dilip Walse Patil on Friday held a meeting to review the COVID-19 situation in Pune, said sources.
“The meeting is currently underway at Pune Council Hall. Deputy CM Ajit Pawar and Home Minister Dilip Walse Patil are joined by other senior officials of the district,” informed sources.
This is the first meeting after cases of new COVID-19 variant Omicron were detected in the city. A total of seven people in Pune had tested positive for Omicron. Six people, including three Nigerian nationals, tested positive for the ‘Omicron’ strain in Pimpri Chinchwad of Pune district, informed Municipal Commissioner Rajesh Patil on Monday. Later, one more was tested positive for the variant in Pune city.
Meanwhile, one of these seven people has recovered from the infection. “The first Omicron patient of the Pune city has tested negative in his RT-PCR test and is all set to go home today,” said Deputy Health Chief of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), Dr Sanjeev Wavare on Friday. The first two cases of the Omicron variant were reported in the country in Karnataka, followed by one in Gujarat’s Jamnagar and then another in Maharashtra’s Dombivili.
The new variant of COVID-19 was first reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) from South Africa on November 25. As per the WHO, the first known confirmed B.1.1.529 infection was from a specimen collected on November 9 this year. On November 26, the WHO named the new COVID-19 variant B.1.1.529, which has been detected in South Africa, as ‘Omicron’. The WHO has classified Omicron as a ‘variant of concern’.
