Puducherry: The first Omicron cases were confirmed in the Union Territory of Puducherry, on Tuesday,  after the novel variant was identified in samples from two COVID-19-recovered people of the city during genome sequencing at NIMHANS in Bengaluru.

The patient, a 28-year-old woman, in home isolation and an 82-year-old male admitted to the TB and Chest Diseases Hospital, both tested positive for COVID-19 in the first week of December and recovered.

"We've already told the PHCs in the patients' neighbourhoods to perform targeted contact tracing and sample collection," said L. Ravi Varman, director of the National Centre for Disease Control's Integrated and Disease Surveillance Program.

The samples were taken from these patients as part of routine surveillance testing before the health department purchased the particular RTPCR kits for evaluating the S gene droput or S gene target failure, which is an Omicron marker. Two sentinel surveillance sites in the UT have been recognised by the ISDP: JIPMER in Puducherry and the General Hospital in Karaikal.

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