Tamil Nadu, one of the highest contributors to India’s Covid-19 tally with over 7 lakh cases, has been witnessing a downward trend in the number of people testing for the novel coronavirus in the past week with the recovery rate hitting a whopping 93%.
Despite the gains made, the Health Department does not want to “let the guard down” as it feels the coronavirus is “unpredictable” and even one small event can turn into a potential cluster or a super-spreader.
Also, the upcoming festival season and the north-east monsoon is giving jitters to those at the helm as they fear crowding of people at shopping centres could lead to an increase in the numbers yet again. “We cannot claim success as yet. We are not going to do that because we are dealing with a pandemic. And to be honest, we are being very cautious now, more than ever. With upcoming monsoon likely to be a breeding ground for Dengue, and illnesses due to food and water contamination, we are not letting our guard down,” Health Secretary Dr. J. Radhakrishnan told DH in an interview.
He also dismissed suggestions that the testing numbers have been reduced by maintaining that the state was testing over 80,000 samples a day though the number went up to 95,000 on a couple of occasions. The daily cases in Chennai have also gone below 1,000.
The recovery rate of 93.4% as on Thursday evening was one of the highest in the country as the number of active cases stood at just 34,198.
Radhakrishnan said the goal was to further reduce the number of people testing positive for the novel Coronavirus and keeping the fatality rate below 1%, which is now a little higher at 1.5%.
The cases have also come down to around 3,100 a day after having hovered between 5,500 to 6,000, while the number of deaths per day has also witnessed a slump. At last count on Thursday morning, Tamil Nadu had a total of 7,00,193 cases, including 6,55,170 recoveries and 10,825 deaths. The positivity rate is also below 5% for the past few days.
Radhakrishnan, considered a disaster mitigation expert, attributed the dip in cases to micro-level planning, aggressive testing policy, fever camps at various parts of the state to identify those with severe acute respiratory illness (SARI) and influenza-like illness (ILI) symptoms and door-to-door screening of residents.
The state sticking to RT-PCR tests, considered very reliable by medical experts is also another reason for early detection of cases and recovery.
“Fever camps which began in Chennai initially and expanded to other parts of the state where people underwent basic check-up and door-to-door screening helped us contain the virus. Testing was made easy with 194 labs over a period of seven months and in Chennai, we collected samples at homes,” he added.
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