By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, April 26, 2020: The number of Covid-19 positive persons has shot up to 103 in Odisha with three more persons testing positive for the virus in Sundargarh on Sunday, the health department said.

However, in a fresh boost to Odisha’s fight against Covid-19, a patient in Bhubaneswar has recovered from the highly contagious disease, officials said on Sunday. With his recovery, altogether 35 of the total 103 COVID-19 cases detected so far in the state have been declared cured of the disease.

Earlier on Saturday, six persons from Jajpur district had tested positive for the virus. With this the total number of positive cases in Sundargarh rose to six and in Jajpur it rose to 17. Jajpur besides Bhadrak (16) and Balasore (10) have reported spurt in the number of positive cases in the past one week, with most patients having West Bengal travel history.

The state government on Saturday conducted several camps in many schools across Bhadrak, Jajpur and Balasore districts to collect swab samples of vulnerable people for Covid-19 test and stopped all incoming vehicles, including ambulances, from West Bengal to rule out possible influx of migrants.

Sources said the health department personnel collected more than 3,000 swab samples from the three districts and sent for test. After aggressive testing of samples of vulnerable people using the confirmatory RT PCR method, the state government is planning mass random testing of people using rapid test kits in the three districts, the way it did it in Bhubaneswar. However, the plan depends on supply of such kits.

Odisha had got about 6,000 rapid test kits from Indian Council of Medical Research. Around 5,000 of them were used in Bhubaneswar, which has reported 46 positive cases, for community surveillance. The Odisha Medical Services Corporation, state’s medical equipment procurement agency, has placed orders with multiple agencies for the more than two lakh IMCR-approved kits.

At the moment, there are now 67 active COVID-19 cases in the state while a 72-year-old man from Bhubaneswar died of the disease on April 6.