When the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in the region will largely be determined over the post-Deepavali fortnight, health officials plan to ramp up random testing across multiple locations.
The arrival of a mass-participation festival like Deepavali at a time when the health administration has been able to lower the COVID-19 caseload as well as related deaths may prove to be a double-edged sword as large number of people had confidently ventured out on the days leading up to the festival of lights.
On Sunday, the Union Territory posted only 25 new cases though the test numbers were also low at 475 samples.
The number of active cases also slipped below the 1,000 mark for the first time in several months.
No deaths were reported in the last 24 hours.
The overall tally in the Union Territory was 608 deaths, 984 active cases, a cumulative total of 36,324 cases and 34,732 recovered patients.
Starting Monday, the Health Department will be ramping up testing across the city. “We will have to maintain high testing volumes probably till the end of the month to be able to definitively rule out a second surge,” said S. Mohan Kumar, Director of Health.
The COVID war room will also be monitoring neighbourhoods where cases surface in a bunch. “Based on case analysis by the war room, we have been able to quickly deploy three-pronged interventions in potential hotspots with teams carrying out intensive testing, enforcement and awareness,” said T. Arun, Health Secretary.
The target is to ramp up testing to between 4,000 to 5,000 every day at least over the next fortnight. The department has formed ten joint mobile enforcement teams comprising officials drawn from health, police and revenue departments who are covering the length and breadth of the city every day to carry out random tests.
Shopping zones, malls, markets and the beach are among the high-footfall sites where random testing is being carried out. An awareness campaign for the festive season is also carried out aimed at spreading the core prevention message of masking, social distancing and hand-sanitising across vantage locations.
On Deepavali day, the celebrations were probably on a scale bigger than previous years with the city turning on the pyrotechnics virtually through the day, almost as if the residents were venting their frustration over the hardships induced by the pandemic in the preceding months — this was in spite of restrictions on timings that stipulated bursting of firecrackers only between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.
With tourists filing in over the weekend, the Promenade Beach was chock-a-block towards the evening hours posing a crowd management challenge in the times of a pandemic for police teams in deployment at the premises.