JOIN USCoronavirus: Five more attendees of Delhi conference test positive in Tamil Nadu
Five more people from Tamil Nadu who attended a religious conference organised by Tableeqi Jamaat in New Delhi earlier this month tested positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday, taking the number of persons affected by the virus from this cluster alone to 21.
As the tally of those testing positive in the state going up to 74, the Tamil Nadu government intensified efforts to track all 1,500 people who participated in the religious conference in the national capital and quarantine them.
While three patients were admitted to Villupuram Medical College hospital, two are quarantined at Government Rajaji Hospital in Madurai.
Chief Secretary K Shanmugam said identifying these people and their contacts were imperative to prevent further spread of COVID-19 in the state as 21 persons from this group alone have tested positive. He also admitted practical difficulties in identifying these people since many of them are not reachable on their mobile phones.
“We need to track these people because it is a large group and they might have come in contact with others too. If we track these people, I think we will be able to control further spread in the state,” Shanmugam said.
A senior Health Department official, who is actively involved in the tracking process, told DH nearly 90 per cent of the people of the group who have returned to Tamil Nadu have been tracked and most of them lodged under hospital or government quarantine. He said nearly 400 people are in Delhi and have been quarantined by the Delhi Government.
Besides the 21 people, two Thai nationals, who have tested positive for COVID-19, were also part of the Jamaat event and at least nine people who came in direct or indirect contact with them have also tested positive for the virus.
He said the Health Department swung into action after a Thai national, who died after testing negative for COVID-19, informed authorities that a group of people from Thailand were in the Erode district. “We then quarantined the six Thai nationals two of whom tested positive. And we launched efforts to track their history and even sealed a few streets that they visited in Erode,” the official said.
The total tally in the state went up to 74 on Tuesday with seven people, including the aforementioned five, testing positive. A 43-year-old man with travel history to Kerala capital Thiruvananthapuram and a 28-year-old youth who came in contact with a 25-year-old positive patient who worked in a shopping mall here also tested positive.
The government has so far quarantined 74,533 people who returned from abroad while lodging 79 asymptomatic passengers in quarantine facilities near airport and placing 364 under hospital isolation.