Coimbatore: Three months after the state government instructed it to bring down the number of fresh Covid-19 cases to less than 100 a day and the death rate to 1%, the district administration has achieved the first target.
The district recorded 93 fresh cases, which took the total tally to 51,884. Saturday was the third day in a row that the district recorded less than 100 cases a day. The numbers are unlikely to change, with the 97 UK returnees testing negative.
Only 3,066 cases have been recorded this month until Saturday. Even if the district records 100 cases a day for the next five days, the count will be around 3,600, which is the lowest monthly tally since July, when 4,282 cases were recorded.
“There are several reasons for the steady drop, including conducting fever camps next to areas with fresh cases, tracing primary contacts immediately and isolating them,” said deputy director public health Dr G Ramesh Kumar. “Some strict measures like banning home isolation, and allowing it only on rare occasions, also helped us reduce the spread.”
Increasing immunity among the general public has also helped to bring down the transmission rate, said former director of public health Dr K Kolandaswamy. “As more people recover from the infection and gain immunity, they will not catch the infection or spread it for awhile. The number of people a person can get infected from has gradually been reducing since September.”
Though the death rate remains at 1.24%, the number of deaths has reduced noticeably this month. December has so far recorded only 30 deaths due to the virus, which is the lowest monthly death toll since July.
“We even had three or four days that had not even a single death,” said a health department official. “ This was again because of the ban on home isolation and time-tested protocols,” he added.