There is an increase in Covid cases, but no reason to panic: Tamil Nadu health minister

CHENNAI: There is no reason to panic about the rising number of Covid cases as the state has “adequate experience, infrastructure and medicines to deal with any surge,” Tamil Nadu health minister Ma Subramanian said on Tuesday.
“There is an increase in cases, but there is no reason to panic,” he said. Fresh cases of Covid – 19 had been steadily increasing over the last two months, although there were no major clusters requiring micro-containment measures, he said.
The state would conduct a study to measure population immunity due to past infections and vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for causing Covid-19 infection, Subramanian said.
Last week, Union health ministry officials wrote to health officials in the state asking them to initiate preventive measures. On Monday, Tamil Nadu reported 76 new cases of Covid-19 taking the active cases tally to 402. “Fresh cases of Covid-19 dropped to two in January. Over the last few weeks, cases have increased across India including Tamil Nadu,” Subramanian said.
Sero-surveillance will be conducted in 38 districts by the directorate of public health as part of its disease surveillance activities along with continuous monitoring of new cases, variants, hospitalisation and mortality rates. “Previous surveys showed that nearly 90% of people carried immunity against the viral infection. That’s possibly why we have fewer hospitalisations and deaths over the last six to eight months. We will repeat this study now,” he said.
The health department will also administer vaccination to healthcare providers as a preventive measure to boost immunity, he said.
More international passengers, particularly those from countries such as Kuwait and Singapore, were testing positive for Covid-19, he said. The state conducts RT-PCR randomly on two percent of international passengers as per the guideline from the Union ministry.
Over the past few days, up to six passengers tested positive every day compared two patients once in three days a month ago. On an average, the state draws samples from at least 35,000 people a week for RT-PCR.