Hours after tweeting on Friday that the Delta variant dominated the COVID third wave in Karnataka, State Health Minister K Sudhakar clarified that it was both Omicron and the Delta strains.

"Which strain is dominating which wave in Karnataka? As per the genome sequencing sample, the following are the dominant strains: Second wave: 90.7% Delta Third wave: 67.5% Omicron and 26% Delta," the minister tweeted.

He deleted his previous tweet, where he had said, "Which strain is dominating the third wave in Karnataka? As per the 6,000 samples that were genome sequenced, Delta and it's sub lineages make up for 3/4th of the cases followed by Omicron."

According to the data gathered using genome sequencing activity for a sample of 5,659, up to December 2021, there were cases of 4,027 Delta and its sublineages, 156 Alpha cases, 66 Omicron cases and 184 cases of ETA, BETA, Kappa and Pango.

However, during January 2022 where 1,853 samples were taken for genome sequencing, there were 1,049 Omicron cases, 404 Delta and its sublineage and 102 cases of ETA, BETA, Kappa and Pango.

On Thursday, with 31,198 fresh cases, Karnataka's COVID-19 caseload reached 37,23,694, while 50 deaths took the death toll to 38,804, the health department said. Fresh infections saw a dip by about 7,000 cases compared to Thursday when the number was 38,083, the department said in its bulletin. It added that 71,092 people were discharged, taking the total number of recoveries to 33,96,093.

The positivity and case fatality rates for the day were at 20.91% and 0.16%, respectively. Active cases stood at 2,88,767.

Bengaluru contributed about 50% of the infections of the day with 15,199 cases. The city also reported eight deaths.

Other districts too had fresh cases including 1,877 in Mysuru, 1,500 in Dharwad, 1,315 in Tumakuru and 1,037 in Hassan.

There were zero fatalities in 11 districts.