On Saturday, day four of lockdown, Tamil Nadu saw a surge in the number of COVID-19 cases. With four more people testing positive for the disease, the number of cases touched 42. This include two people who have recovered and another patient who passed away.
On Saturday morning, National Health Mission, Tamil Nadu tweeted saying two people—a 42-year old man from Kumbakonam who had returned from West Indies and a 49-year-old man from Katpadi who returned from UK—tested positive. While the patient from Kumbakonam was admitted at the TMCH in Thanjavur, the second patient was admitted to a private hospital at Vellore. Incidentally the two had travelled via Middle East.
Later in the day, the health department declared that a 60-year old patient from Rajapalayam tested positive and was admitted to Madurai Medical College and a 25-year old man from West Mambalam in Chennai tested positive and is undergoing treatment in isolation at a private hospital in Chennai.
For Tamil Nadu’s health department tracing the contacts of people who tested positive is proving to be a challenge. On Friday, the health department established the contacts of six of the nine patients who had tested positive. It failed to establish the contact point of three others, including a 73-year-old from Pammal in Chennai.
According to sources, the 73-year old woman had attended prayer meetings in a church recently and also had a history of comorbidities. Another patient, a 39-year old man from Annanagar had travelled in a train from Trichy to Chennai just before the lockdown. He had also attended a birthday party recently. It is turning to be huge task for the health department to track the contacts and identify them.
According to highly placed sources in the Rajiv Gandhi Government Hospital in Chennai, the number of cases has been increasing. Sources say that on Monday, two days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for lockdown, at least 53 patients walked into the Out Patient ward with high fever. “The doctors are having a tough time. Summer is usually the time for seasonal flu. The doctors will have to identify if its seasonal flu or COVID-19 before the samples are taken for testing. Again we will need ample test kits as each patient will have to be tested at least thrice, before being discharged,” one of the doctors told The Week, on conditions of anonymity.
Meanwhile the health department has been taking continuous measures to contain the spread of coronavirus. It called for a meeting through video conferencing with the district collectors, medical college deans, deputy directors and assistant directors from Erode, Coimbatore, Trichy, Tirunelveli, Madurai, Ariyalur, Vellore, Chengalpet, Tiruppur, Kanchipuram and Thanjavur. A containment plan was also discussed during the meeting. As per the plan, the district authorities have been given instructions for sanitisation and spraying disinfectants. Accordingly, if any patient is tested positive, the authorities have been asked to sanitise eight kilometres around the residence of the patient. Also the authorities will have to make sure the people around eight kilometres stay in isolation to contain the spread of the virus. For this, the district authorities have been instructed to deploy one Village Health Nurse (VHN) and one ASHA worker per 50 houses. The VHNs and the ASHAs will go door to door and check for any infections in their areas. The health workers will also check for elderly in their areas who are considered as “vulnerable group” and also pregnant women.
