Viral load weighs TN districts down
As the attention of health and district authorities has been focused on Chennai and the three adjoining districts of Kancheepuram, Thiruvallur and Chengapattu that have been locked down till June 30, there has been a silent spurt of cases in the southern district of Madurai and the western district of Coimbatore. The number of cases in Madurai touched 849, with 157 reported on Monday alone. The uneasy spike has prompted Madurai district authorities to follow the Chennai model of announcing an intense lockdown—for a week from June 24 to June 30.
Health officials have been asked to organise fever clinics for early detection and carry out house-to-house surveys to identify potential Covid cases. Similarly, Coimbatore and the adjoining districts of Erode, Salem, Tirupur and Nilgiris, which had been boasting of slowly flattening the curve by not having reported cases for weeks, have now seen a spurt. Coimbatore alone has reported 100 new cases in the past week, its sharpest rise since March.
Most of these are returnees from Chennai and adjoining districts. After the June 1 easing of curbs, when one needed an e-pass with a QR code to cross over, there have been many cases of fake passes being shown at checkposts. But this racket amplified during the run-up to the sealing of borders around Chennai and the adjoining districts on June 19. Police officials had to scan the QR code for authentication, but many allowed vehicles through after simply checking whether they had a pass.
Apart from this lapse is the absence of quarantine discipline needed after reaching a particular destination from a hotspot like Chennai. A case in point was a popular jewellery store in Coimbatore that ferried 30 staff from Chennai sans e-pass and did not even place them under quarantine. They had to report for work the moment they arrived. The revenue department sealed the store last week, but four of the staff had already tested positive.
The Madurai and Coimbatore examples are to be internalised by the state. Without diluting the focus on hotspots, the vigil has to be spread evenly now as the crossovers have resulted in the viral load being distributed across TN.