CHENNAI: Continuing with the steady decline in the number of COVID-19 positives, Chennai on Tuesday recorded 1078 cases and 18 deaths.
The city has so far recorded 79,662 cases and 1295 deaths. On Tuesday, a total of 1858 people were discharged taking the total discharge rate to 62,552 which is way higher than the 15,814 active cases in the city.
Testing, however, has slightly decreased in the city, from 10,048 tests conducted on Sunday to 8,601 on Monday, according to data released by Corporation.
Experts have said that the city needs to be testing at 10,000-mark daily to bring down the positivity rate to 5 per cent. The daily positivity rate in the city currently is at 13.57 per cent.
Even as the cases dropped in Chennai, the containment zones remained at a high of 272 as Tondiarpet still battles with 50 containment zones and Kodambakkam has 134 containment zones.
Corporation officials with the Tondiarpet zone said that the high containment zone number does not indicate there are as many active cases.
“Close to 75 per cent of people have recovered here. The containment zones are still there because as per protocols, a street must not record even a single case for 14 days to be declassified from a containment zone,’’ said an official, adding that most of the streets would be removed from the list in the coming week if cases don’t come up.
As per the Chennai Corporation’s data, about 77 per cent people have recovered from COVID while the active cases are just 21 per cent.
Zone wise data indicates that Royapuram just has 13 per cent active cases while other erstwhile hotspots, Thiruvika Nagar and Tondiarpet have just 19 and 16 per cent active cases respectively.
However, some of the zones in southern Chennai are now having more active cases, Kodambakkam has 29 per cent active cases, Alandur has 28 and Sholinganallur has 27.
The civic body has been holding fever camps to bring down the positivity rate. So far, 1.03 lakh people have attended the 16,609 camps held. In that, swabs were taken from 48,369 people and 12,107 have turned positive, which is a positivity rate of 24.68 per cent.
Officials said that the high positivity rate in these camps is due to adequate testing of severely symptomatic people.
Meanwhile, Corporation Commissioner G Prakash on Tuesday gave Rs 1000 worth groceries to the 510 office assistants at the Ripon Buildings and Zonal offices.