The spread of coronavirus is showing no sign of slowdown in the State with the government machinery detecting 83 new cases during the past 24 hours.

The COVID-19 tally has gone up to 2,797. Among the new cases detected, 17 are of those who came back to the State recently from Gulf countries under the Vande Bharat Mission by air. Twelve of them were from Kuwait, three from Dubai of Saudi Arabia and two from Qatar, according to the bulletin issued by the Health Department. In addition to this, 11 of the new cases were linked to Tamil Nadu’s Koyambedu hotspot.

On the bright side, 37 patients have recovered while no deaths were reported. Currently, 900 active patients are undergoing treatment and at least 1,841 have been discharged from hospitals. The recovery rate was 66% and the mortality rate was 2%.

For the cases of people coming from abroad and other States and testing positive for COVID-19 upon arrival, no containment strategy would be implemented as the persons are tested immediately after entering and quarantined or isolated as per the protocol, according to officials.

A new milestone

Meanwhile, the State’s testing capacity has gone up once again as 11, 357 samples were tested in a span of 24 hours, for the first time.

With this, the number of samples tested in the State crossed the 3-lakh-mark, the highest in the country. So far, 3, 04,326 tests have been conducted and only 0.97% of the people tested turned out to be positive. The tests per million population was close to 6, 000.

At present, the State is equipped with 12 RT-PCR laboratories and about 43 TrueNat laboratories and two more RT-PCR laboratories are going to come up soon.