Infection rate falling in Chennai, 12 TN districts

Madurai Is The Sole Exception Where It’s Rising

Pushpa.Narayan@timesgroup.com

Chennai:19.04.2020

The numbers bring some good news. The rate at which people are being infected is slowing in Chennai and 12 other districts of Tamil Nadu that have at least 40 cases as of Friday, with Madurai the only exception.

TOI’s analysis of the data put out by the state health department shows that although the total number of cases in all TN districts has been increasing over the past three weeks, the growth rate has slowed. This is reflected in the compound daily growth rate (CDGR) or the average percentage of daily increase, which has been dropping across districts, and most dramatically in Chennai.

While overall, the state recorded a CDGR of 21% between April 1 and April 6, it came down to 9.3% between April 6 and April 11. The week after that till Friday, it dropped to 5.3%. All districts, except Madurai, reflected the trend. “This means the state has been able to not just track maximum number of cases within the cluster but has been able to effectively pull down the curve uniformly across all districts,” said health minister C Vijayabaskar.

The biggest drop was recorded by Chennai, which has the most Covid-19 positive cases in the state — 228 as of Friday. The state capital’s CDGR of 33.4% in the first week of April dropped by nearly 30 percentage points to 3.8% by April 17. In Tirupur, it came down from 47.6 %to 20.6% while Namakkal brought it down from 9.2% to 3.4%. 

Daily avg increase in cases at 59

The only district that has been seeing a consistent increase was Madurai, where the CDGR went up from 4.8% to 9.9% in three weeks.

Over all, the state which had 124 cases on March 31 saw its first three digit daily rise of 110 – the biggest jump till date – on April 1. That day, the total number of Covid-19 cases recorded by Tamil Nadu was

234. The same day, Coimbatore reported 28 cases, Tirunelveli reported 26, Theni reported 20, and Dindigal had 17 new cases.

In the next three days, the number of cases reported by the state saw a steep climb, with an average daily increase of 82 cases. On April 4, the state’s total number of cases doubled to 485. During those three days the number of cases in Chennai alone went up from 26 to 88, Ranipet had 22 new cases, and in Dindigul cases went up from 17 to 43. “That was the shortest doubling period the state saw,” said joint director of public health (epidemiology) Dr P Sampath.

The next doubling period happened over a week, when the number increased to 969 on April 11. During this time the average daily increase came down to 69 cases, although more cases were reported in Chennai, Coimbatore, Tirupur, and Tirunelveli. Between April 11 and now, the daily average increase across the states has fallen to 59 cases across all districts.