United Kingdom returnees to the state testing positive for the virus remained at 24 today.

Till date, a total 24 returnees and 20 of their contacts have tested positive, a health department bulletin said.

Recoveries continued to outnumber new infections with 1,029 people being discharged from various hospitals, taking the total to 7,98,420 so far.

Of the 921 new cases, Chennai reported 252, while the rest were scattered in other districts.

The state capital accounted for 2,25,758 infections out of the 8.18 lakh plus tally.

All 13 people who died had co-morbidities or chronic diseases and one was a returnee from Karnataka, the bulletin said.

The toll of 12,135 included Chennai's 4,014, the highest in the state.

The active cases further dipped to 8,380 till date.  As many as 67,151 samples were tested on Friday, taking the cumulative total to 1,42,58,645 specimens examined so far.

Meanwhile, health minister C Vijayabaskar said Tamil Nadu would conduct a dry run for COVID-19 vaccination at 17 places across the state on Saturday, including Chennai, Coimbatore and the Nilgiris.

"We will begin dry run of the COVID-19 vaccine in Tamil Nadu tomorrow based on ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research)", he told reporters after inaugurating a 100 bed ICU facility at the Kilpauk Medical College Hospital here.

The minister said the health department has identified 47,200 centres for the purpose and has provided training to 21,170 health care personnel.

"We are planning to fix a time period of providing vaccination to 25 people in two hours," he said.

To a query, he said vaccination has to be done carefully since COVID-19 was a new kind of virus and a dry run was important in this regard.

The Minister said that in the initial phase, infrastructure facilities to preserve the vaccine, set up in association with Tamil Nadu Medical Services Corporation, would cater to 2.5 crore people.

Responding to a query, he said the government was conducting 70,000 RT-PCR tests a day, despite the daily COVID-19 infections falling below the 1,000 mark.

"New COVID-19 cases has dropped significantly (in Tamil Nadu) and we have not reduced the number of sample tests. That is the strategy. We are testing 70,000 samples a day.

The World Health Organisation and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have congratulated us (for the government's strategy)," he said.

Tamil Nadu on December 30 reported below 1,000 new COVID-19 cases nearly after a gap of seven months.