CHENNAI: Special teams consisting of officials from state health, local administration and police departments are on the lookout for UK returnees in Chennai and Chengalpet who could not be traced so far.
Approximately 2,300 patients had returned from the UK to the state since November 21 and the government has been able to trace 1,936 people among them. All have been tested by RT-PCR method in local labs.
Of them, only 24 have tested positive while 1,853 have tested negative. Results of the remaining 59 are awaited. Another 20 people, who were in contact with these patients, have also tested positive.
Samples of all these 44
Covid patients have been sent to National Institute of Virology, Pune, for genomic analysis in order to find out whether they belonged to the new strain or not. So far, two test results have been released.
While one person from Chennai has tested positive for the new strain, another one from Madurai tested negative for the mutant strain. Other test results are awaited.
In order to avoid delays, the state government has requested permission from the Centre to send samples of UK returnees to two central institutes in Bengaluru NIMHANS and National Centre for Biological Sciences for genomic analysis.
The state is yet to trace around
360 UK returnees, all of whom are from Chennai and Chengalpet. Those in all other TN districts have already been traced.
On Thursday, the fresh infection rate in the state continued to decline with 937 people testing positive.
The death toll increased to 12,122 with 13 people succumbing to the disease on Thursday. With the recovery rate touching 97.5%, the active case count has dropped to 8,501. Among them, Chennai (259 new cases) and its three neighbouring districts have almost 45% of cases.