Thiruvananthapuram: The weekly positivity rate of RT-PCR tests in the district went below 5% in the first two weeks of December. It is for the first time since July that the rate went below 5%. The positivity rates of RT-PCR tests in the first two weeks of December have been 4.4 and 4.2% respectively.
Any rate below 5% is indicative of low levels of disease transmission. RT-PCR positivity rate in the district peaked to 9.2% in the third week of July and went as high as 17.9% by the third week of August.
In the following months, it tended to dip slightly and post Onam, the graph peaked again to touch 17.5% by the fourth week of September. It was from the middle of October that RT PCR
test positivity rate began to come down in the district.
The rate has been below 7% since the second week of November which has reflected dip in transmission. The low RT-PCR positivity rates have been reported in December with the highest number of RT PCR tests.
Between first and second week of December, 30,069 RT-PCR tests were done in the district and it yielded 1,290 positives.
Antigen tests, which have far outnumbered RT-PCR tests in the district, have also shown a declining trend in terms of positivity rates.
Weekly antigen test positivity rate of district has dropped from 18.8 to 7.8% between September and December.
The drop has been steady since November as TPR of antigen tests came down from 14% to 7.8% by the second week of December.
While the RT-PCR positivity rate dropped below 5% in the district, the total weekly positivity rate has dropped to 6.3%.
Since July, when community transmission swept coastal stretches in the district, the positivity rate grew from 4.5% to 17.6%.
Since the first week of November, the rate has touched below 10% and has slowly been on the downward slide.
Officials hope that without any other peak, the total positivity rate could easily come down below 5% in the district.
The evident dip in weekly test positivity rates comes as a huge relief for the district which was handling above 500 daily cases for three-four months.
The test positivity rate, which had always been a concern for the district, recorded 10.37% by the first week of November, which was even lower than the state’s TPR of 10.98%.
The TPR of district had swayed between alarming scales; 13-19% during that period.
The weekly positivity rate in the district rose from 13.3% in the first week of September to 17.6% by the month end. As many as 24,411 cases were detected in five weeks out of 1,55,342 tests which were done in September.
Over 1.6 lakh samples were tested in October in first four weeks itself and the weekly positivity rate ranged between 13.7% and 16.8%.
Right from the first week of October which recorded the highest number of samples tested for a week so far, positivity rate had dropped slightly from 17%.
Meanwhile, there has been a sharp dip in testing in government sector.
Since the first week of October, testing in government sector dropped from 60.2% to 39.7%. In the same period, testing in private sector has gone from 39.8% to 60.3%.