Virus spreading fast in city, case count crosses 1,000-mark

Virus spreading fast in city, case count crosses 1,000-mark

Pushpa.Narayan@timesgroup.com

Chennai:  118.05.2020

The Covid-19 positive count continued to rise in Chennai, which accounted for 176 of the 203 fresh cases in Tamil Nadu on Friday. With this, the number of cases in Chennai crossed 1,000. The toll in the state went up to 28, with the death of a 98-year-old man at the Omandurar multispeciality hospital in Chennai.

Of the 27 Covid-19 cases in the rest of the state, eight were in Chengalpet and two in Kancheepuram, both districts adjoining Chennai, which now has 1,082 cases.

Researchers at the National Institute of Epidemiology, an ICMR institution in Chennai, said the doubling time (weekly average) — the time it takes for the cases to double — had come down in Chennai from nine days on Monday to five days on May 1. During that time, the city recorded 512 new cases (nearly 50% of the total cases in the state). “The doubling time came down to seven on Tuesday and was six in the next two days. On Friday, it was just five days,” the researchers said. This means the rate of infection in the city is increasing rapidly. Last week, the doubling time was hovering between seven and eight days.

5 clusters behind spike in Chennai

Corporation commissioner G Prakash on Friday attributed spike in cases in the city to five clusters — residents who returned from foreign countries, attendees of the Tablighi Jamaat event held in Delhi, participants of a prayer meet held at Thiru-vi-ka Nagar, cases that traced their origin to a media house in Royapuram, and a cluster that sprung up from Koyambedu market. P2

Contact tracing no longer simple, says health official

Chennai’s expanding clusters have put the health care machinery under pressure. “Contact tracing is no longer simple. On the one hand, the number of people whose source of infection can’t be identified continues to go up. On the other hand, we are seeing multiple sources of infection for some others,” said a senior health official.

For instance, an oil merchant in Pulianthope who tested positive on Friday may be been infected because of his visits to the wholesale market in Koyambedu or because he was living in a containment zone. “His wife also tested positive. There are at least a dozen others living with them. Swabs have been taken for all of them,” a zonal health official said. At least five more people from the Koyambedu fruit vendor’s neighbourhood in Ayyappa Nagar near Chinmaya Nagar tested positive.

More and more policemen, vegetable vendors, grocers and contacts and neighbours of conservancy staff are testing positive. In almost every zone, there were clusters of cases. There were 11 people from the same street in Murty Nagar in Vyasarpadi, nine of them from Maddox street in Choolai and an equal number of them from VR Pillai Street in Triplicane. The cluster among health care workers has widened too. On Friday, at least eight doctors, including two post graduates at the Madras Medical College, a couple of house-surgeons attached to the Kilpauk Medical College Hospital, one from ESI Medical College in KK Nagar, two doctors from a private hospital in Chennai and another from Madurai were tested positive.

Health minister C Vijayabaskar said the state does 165 tests per million population compared to the national average of 65. “At least 14% of samples tested in India are from TN. We have 46 testing labs across the state. So far, we have tested 1.29 lakh samples for 1.20 lakh people. We are slightly behind a more densely populated Maharashtra, which has screened 1.39 lakh samples,” he said.