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Virudhunagar crosses 10,000 Covid-19 cases

Madurai: Virudhunagar with 10,155 cases has become the second district in south after Madurai to touch the five-digit mark. After crossing 1,000 cases on July 7, the district added more than 9,000 cases so far. The district had recorded more than 500 cases a day once, more than 400 cases thrice, 300 or more cases on 10 occasions and more than 200 cases on seven days.



As many as 577 cases were reported on July 28. The district got the warning bell when cases started to climb when e-pass free travel was allowed and people started frequenting neighbouring Madurai in June. Health department officials said that the second warning bell was when Madurai crossed 10,000 cases on July 27.

Aggressive testing by conducting 2,858 fever camps, which included around 100 a day for the last few days, help bring down the daily positive cases. The average daily cases in the district between August 5 and 9 are only 140 as against 310 a day during the previous four weeks. Of the 1,740 hamlets in the district, 361 hamlets had people affected by Covid-19 and only 130 have active cases.

The number of containment zones in the district was reduced from 177 on Saturday to 108 on Monday. “When five or more cases are reported from a locality we form containment zones there and it will continue till a door-to-door screening for fever and sample collection is completed,” Virudhunagar district collector R Kannan told TOI.

While Sivakasi, Virudhunagar and Aruppukottai towns and the adjoining rural areas have more active cases it has started coming down in the eight other blocks. Though testing capacity of the district is only 1,000 a day sample collection has been increased to 4,000 a day last week in a phased manner over the last three weeks.

A special team under the district revenue officer is coordinating sample testing mechanism as 75% of the samples have to be sent to other districts for testing. Around 2,000 samples are sent to Coimbatore every day, followed by 1,000 samples on alternate days to Chennai, 1,000 on alternate days to Erode and 500 on alternate days to Kanyakumari for testing.

Backlog of pending samples has also been reduced. It has been cleared till August 6 and the current backlog is only around 5,000 samples. Daily positivity rate that was 33% when around 300 samples were collected went as high as 37% when the district reported 400 to 500 positive cases a day. Now positivity is only around 5 to 7% in the last 10 days.

One of the reasons for the spike in mid-July was a technical snag in one of the testing units in the government hospital which showed more results as positive. An expert team from the Madurai medical college attended to it and carried out the course correction 15 days ago. Results from the rectified unit were crosschecked with the same samples sent to a laboratory in Chennai.

Battling Covid-19

Samples tested – 92,019

Positive cases – 10,155

Discharged – 8,421

Active cases – 1,595

Deaths – 139

Total hamlets in the district – 1,740

Hamlets with Covid-18 cases – 361

Hamlets with active cases – 130

Average cases per day

July 7 to August 4 – 310

August 5 to 9 – 140

Positivity Rate

Current – 5.5 to 7%

Average – 11.6%

Highest – 37%

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