The night curfew in eight cities of Gujarat – Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat, Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Jamnagar, Gandhinagar and Junagadh – will be in force from 11 pm to 5 am from Saturday, reported news agency ANI.
The curfew timing was recently reduced to be in place from 1 am till 5 am.
This comes as the state on Thursday reported 7 more cases of Omicron coronavirus variant, taking the tally of the new strain in Gujarat to 30.
Meanwhile, the central government said that India has detected 358 cases of the Omicron variant so far, out of which 114 patients have recovered.
“Of 358 cases of Omicron variant detected in India so far, 183 were analysed and 121 of them had foreign travel history,” said the government.
Addressing a joint press conference on the pandemic, a senior official said that of the 183 people, 91% were fully vaccinated with three having booster shots, 70% were asymptomatic, and 61% were males.
Citing the World Health Organisation’s findings, the government said Omicron has a significant growth advantage over Delta and is spreading fast through communities with a doubling time of one and a half to three days.
The central government had earlier this week advised states to impose local-level containment measures in areas where either the test positivity goes beyond 10% or occupancy of oxygenated beds is over 40%.
The state reported 111 new cases of Covid-19, taking its overall tally to 8,28,905 on Thursday, while two more patients succumbed to the infection.
The tally of recoveries rose to 8,18,129 after 78 patients were discharged from hospitals during the day. Gujarat now has 668 active cases of coronavirus, of which 12 patients are on ventilators.
As many as 8.78 crore doses of coronavirus vaccines have been administered to the eligible population so far in the state, of which, 2.13 lakh shots were given during the day.