229 schoolchildren test +ve for Covid

WASHIM: A total of 229 students of a public school hostel in Maharashtra’s Washim district have tested coronavirus positive, an official said on Thursday.

Four school staffers have also tested positive, the official said, adding the area has been declared a containment zone.

Altogether 327 students from various districts in Vidarbha region reside at the hostel of the Bhavna Public School.

Earlier this week, 39 students and five employees of a hostel in Latur district of Marathwada had tested positive.

Risod tehsildar Ajit Shelar told PTIthat the students had joined the Washim hostel on February 14.

Twenty one students tested positive in the first few days after which RT-PCR tests of all the 327 students were conducted, he said.

India’s Covid-19 active cases were recorded at 1,51,708, the Union health ministry said on Thursday. A total of 16,738 new daily cases have been recorded in a span of 24 hours.

The ministry said 89.57 per cent of the new cases are from seven states.

Maharashtra continues to report the highest daily new cases at 8,807. It is followed by Kerala with 4,106 cases while Punjab reported 558 new cases.

The state reported 8,807 cases on Wednesday, taking its total infection count to 21,21,119. It had reported 8,142 cases on October 21 last year, after which the numbers had declined.

With 80 deaths reported on Wednesday, the state’s fatality count rose to 51,937, the official said.

Blatant violation of Covid-19 home quarantine and social distancing guidelines and unavailability of adequate resources for contact-tracing have led to a surge in Covid-19 cases in Maharashtra, a senior health official said on Thursday. The Centre has also written to states and UTs to focus on undertaking aggressive measures to break the chain of transmission.