Tamil Nadu is monitoring the COVID-19 situation in the light of a rise in fresh cases in neighbouring Kerala.
On Friday, Health Minister Ma. Subramanian said RT-PCR tests are being increased wherever fever cases are reported. Accordingly, a total of 264 tests were done on Thursday. “Over 200 tests were done in a day after two to three months. The number of persons who tested positive on Thursday was eight of which two were in Chennai. The State has been continuously reporting cases in single digits for nearly six to seven months,” he told reporters.
There were nine fresh cases of COVID-19 on Friday, taking the total number of active cases to 38 of which 17 were in Chennai. The State’s overall positivity rate was 3% (as of December 14).
He said currently, symptoms including throat pain and cough resolved in three to four days, and that there was no need to panic. Whole genome sequencing of samples would be done to ascertain the COVID-19 variant, he said.
Director of Public Health and Preventive Medicine T. S. Selvavinayagam, said they were monitoring the situation. “Surveillance will continue. The surveillance is for all diseases. If not COVID-19, it will give us an idea about dengue, influenza and so on,” he said. As of now, there was no clustering of cases.
“Testing will be done as per the existing protocol. Those with the symptoms will be tested,” he said.
Senior doctors of major government hospitals in the city said there were no COVID-19 cases at the institutions.
Suresh Kumar, consultant, Infectious Diseases, Apollo Hospitals said, “Six months ago, there were nil COVID-19 cases. In the last two months, I have managed around 15 to 20 patients with COVID-19. We have started to see cases of late, and there are a couple of patients being treated in the Intensive Care Unit. Elderly persons with co-morbidities are requiring intensive care due to shortness of breath.”
He added while fever, cough and sore throat remained as the classic symptoms of COVID-19, he was seeing persons with loss of taste and smell as seen in the first wave of COVID-19 infections.
“The reason for seeing more cases now may be because of people visiting crowded places and also the gathering of people at rain shelter camps. To be vigilant, we should test more frequently. When a person comes with symptoms of fever, cough and sore throat, we should first rule out COVID-19 and then look at influenza. When the suspicion is high, we need to test for COVID-19. We need to investigate whether the new strain JN.1 or Pirola (BA.2.86) is the cause as it is happening across the world,” Dr. Suresh Kumar insisted.
