Prisoners detained in Paung township police station have tested positive for Covid 19.
A prisoner who had been ill for about a week was tested on December 10, and then further tests of those close to him revealed the widespread presence of the Covid 19 virus.
“He was sick due to the virus. He was given oxygen and is now in good condition. Thirty-two of his relatives were re-examined, and 16 of them were found to be infected,” said a police official.
The virus was initially found in a 45-year-old man from Kywe Chan Village, Paung Township and in 16 others who were in close contact. Paung Township had been virus-free for the last two months. More than 80,000 people have been vaccinated against the virus in Paung Township and the oxygen factory was temporarily closed because there had been no urgent need for oxygen.
According to the Township Health Department, the infected man is now in good condition and the infection was determined not to be the variant known as ‘omicron’.
In May of this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced it would start naming covid variants using the Greek alphabet. Variants have always had scientific names – for example, Omicron’s is B.1.1.529 – but previously people tended to refer to them by the places they were first discovered.
The WHO says: “While they have their advantages, scientific names can be difficult to say and recall, and are prone to misreporting. As a result, people often resort to calling variants by the places where they are detected, which is stigmatising and discriminatory.”
Covid variants are now named after Greek letters, rather than the country they originated, which was the case earlier in the pandemic. Omicron is the Greek letter “O”, and is the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet. Although there are 14 other strains of the virus, some are not very common, like the Lambda and Mu variants,which is why little has been reported on those variants.
The Oxford Dictionary says the pronunciation for Omicron should be, “o-MIKE-Ron”, which is using the Greek compound “o mikron”, meaning “small o”.
