Coimbatore district stands next to Chennai in terms of maximum number of COVID-19 tests done so far in the State.
As of Saturday, Coimbatore district had done 33,522 tests while Chennai stood at the first place with 1,70,701 tests.
The data was tracked by the Health Department based on entries of RT-PCR tests made by laboratories approved by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). These laboratories are updating the number of tests done per day in the web portal of ICMR.
“As of now, 1,000 to 1,500 swab samples are collected per day for test. The sample size was between 300 and 400 when number of active cases were very low,” said an official in charge of COVID-19 management in the district.
According to Health Department officials, tests are mainly done on those with suspected symptoms of COVID-19, people who have influenza-like illness, people who are admitted to hospitals for various procedures, pregnant women who are two weeks away from expected delivery date, people who seek treatment for non-communicable diseases and people who have a history of travel in COVID-19 affected areas within the State, other States and abroad.
Swab samples are also collected from airport, vehicle checkpoints on highways and from places where positive cases are reported.
There were 102 active cases of COVID-19 in Coimbatore district on Sunday while total number of persons tested positive for the disease stood at 268.
Meanwhile Coimbatore district stood at 13th position in terms of number of tests done per million population.
As of Saturday, the tests per million done in Coimbatore was 8,230 while the figure was 23,660 in Chennai which has the highest number of COVID-19 patients in the State. The district’s figure of tests per million was also less than that of the State which stood at 8,935 on Saturday. At national level, the number of tests per million was 4,657 on Saturday.