Tamil Nadu on Thursday tested as many as 45,888 samples to detect coronavirus and the aggregate number of specimens examined crossed 17.80 lakh, the government said.

Sixty-nine people died of COVID-19 pushing the death toll to 2,236 and 4,549 people tested positive today, the highest single day increase so far.

The state's tally of positive cases stood at 1,56,369 with the addition of new cases, a health department bulletin said.

Two men, aged 92 and 38, were among the dead and in total 63 had co-morbidities while six had none.

Over 5,100 people getting discharged is the highest so far in a single day. Cumulatively, 1,07,416 people have got cured till date.

With over 45,000 samples getting tested today, the total number of specimens scrutinised to find out the presence of the pathogen has gone up to 17,82,635.

Tamil Nadu has 107 labs, 54 in government and 53 in the private sector.

The state was reporting over 4,000 cases daily for the past few days.

The state now has 46,714 active cases, including the home isolation cases, which is lesser than yesterday. There were 69 casualties reported, which took the state's death toll to 2,236.

Since the first week of this month, Chennai's count of daily infections has been witnessing a steady slide due to initiatives such as fever camps, door to door survey to detect people with flu like symptoms and an intensive lockdown for 17 days that ended on July 5.

As regards districts near here, Chengelpet has 8,908 cases, Tiruvallur 8,107 and Kancheepuram 4,310.

Among the southern districts, Madurai topped with 7,597 cases.