CHENNAI: The city on Friday recorded another dip in the number of fresh cases of Covid-19 with only 1,013 people testing positive. The case growth rate in the city has also been low, ever since the cases dropped from the 2,400 levels in the first week of July. Since then, the number of recoveries have risen from 60 per cent to 85 per cent, while active cases have fallen short to just 12.7 per cent.
Officials from the corporation’s Public Health Department said that most people who were diagnosed with Covid-19 in the first week of July, have now been discharged. “The current active cases are those who had tested positive in the past week or so,’’ the official said, while adding that most of the cases are mild-to-moderate, mostly diagnosed from the fever camps or through contact tracing.
“They are kept in the care centres for around four to seven days. Once they are stable, they are sent back home on the condition that they quarantine themselves for a period of 14 days,’’ he said. Corporation officials also claimed that so far, the condition of patients had never deteriorated after they were sent home from the care centres. “Door-to-door survey staff continue to monitor the discharged patients to ensure their condition does not deteriorate suddenly,’’ he added.
Four corporation zones in the city – Teynampet, Manali, Tondiarpet, and Royapuram – have active cases at 10 per cent or below. Further, six zones have registered a recovery rate of over 85 per cent. With around 12,000 tests being done daily, the positivity rate in the city hovers around the 9 per cent mark, even as the civic body had vowed to bring it down to five per cent by August.
Experts opine that a positivity rate of five per cent or below is a good sign that the city has contained the spread of the infection. However, a cause for concern would be the decrease in number of people attending the fever camps. From about 30,000 people attending the camps daily in the first week of July, the footfall had fallen to around 25,000 in the past few days. Of the total 77,358 samples taken from these camps, as many as 15,113 had tested positive till date, indicating that the positivity rate stood at 20 per cent.
CITY TILL DATE
Total cases: 99,794
Discharges: 84,916
Active cases: 12,765