Twenty eight more students and three staff members of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar district have tested positive for COVID-19, taking the number of cases at the school to 82 in the last one week.

According to the health department official, a majority of the infected students are asymptomatic and currently admitted in hospital where they are stable."We had sent  swab samples of some students, who had earlier tested negative, for analysis as they showed some symptoms (of the Coronavirus). Last night, the samples of 19 students returned positive and today, 12 more samples tested positive (three of them staff members, bringing the total number of new cases to 31)," said Dr Prakash Lalge, Health Officer of Parner Tehsil in the adjoining district.

Of the total 82 patients, 6 are staff members of the school. Ahmednagar district collector Rajendra Bhosale said that the school campus has been declared a containment zone after detection of cases among students and staff members. "As a precautionary measure, we have deployed a medical team comprising a doctor and two nurses to monitor other students in the campus," he said. 

The administration had said that the samples of all the students who tested positive were sent for genome sequencing to ascertain if any of them had been infected with the new variant, Omicron.