Eleven schools across Thanjavur have been ordered to close for 14 days after several students, parents and staff members tested positive for the novel coronavirus in the last 15 days. This has led to strict surveillance of all 439 schools in the district, a report said.
Speaking to the media, District Collector M Govinda Rao said that the samples of all the students and teachers in the eleven schools have been taken for testing. So far, 142 students and teachers have tested positive from various schools in Thanjavur. Cases started to increase in Thanjavur’s schools starting on March 8 in a school in Ammapettai and slowly spread to other schools.
Due to this, the District Collector ordered mandatory RT-PCR tests for all 2.75 lakh students between classes 9 and 12 in schools across the district. Fourteen monitoring teams have also been set up in the district to supervise this process. Govinda Rao also said that on inspection, it was found that a few schools had lapses in following the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) issued by the state government and that those violators have been penalised for the non-compliance.
Tamil Nadu reported 1,087 fresh cases of COVID-19 and nine deaths due to the disease on Friday. The number of persons undergoing treatment as of Friday stood at 6,690. Chennai reported 421 new cases while Chengalpattu reported 105 new cases. Coimbatore reported 102 fresh cases while Thiruvallur added 78 new cases to its tally. Thanjavur district reported 64 new cases on Friday.
The state also tested 73,201 samples belonging to 72,998 persons on Friday and the total number of tests performed in Tamil Nadu stood at over 1.86 crore. State Health Secretary J Radhakrishnan expressed concern on the rising number of COVID-19 cases in Tamil Nadu and urged the public to remain cautious and wear masks.