Over the past few weeks, COVID-19 cases have continued to decline in Tamil Nadu and on October 27, its capital city Chennai reported less than 700 new cases of the coronavirus. Chennai’s daily count came down to 695, for the first time in months. Notably, the city had crossed the 700 mark in its daily reporting of new cases in the month of May this year. The numbers have dipped in Coimbatore too, that reported 209 new cases on Tuesday.
Other districts that reported over 100 new cases include Salem (146), Chengalpet (144) and Tiruvallur (115). Dindigul recorded the least number of cases with only two people contracting the disease on Tuesday.
Tamil Nadu reported 2,522 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, taking its total number of active cases to 27,734. With this, the state reported less than 3,000 fresh infections for the fourth successive day. On October 24, the state logged 2,886 new infections while on October 25, it was 2,869. The state saw 2,708 people testing positive for the coronavirus on October 26.
Recoveries on the other hand, have surpassed new cases. On Tuesday, 4,029 patients were discharged from hospitals in the state and with this, 6.75 lakh people have been discharged so far.
Tamil Nadu has tested 96.6 lakh samples as on date and ranks among the states which have conducted the highest number of tests in the entire country. Over eight months into the pandemic, Tamil Nadu has seen 7.14 lakh persons test positive for the coronavirus.
Twenty-seven persons have died on Tuesday, taking the toll of COVID-19 deaths in the state to 10,983. Of this number, 3,607 are from Chennai. No new COVID-19 patient has died at Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital (RGGGH) during the last 24-hour period and according to reports, this is the second time that this has happened in a period of four days at the government hospital in Chennai.
A private lab was accorded approval to conduct COVID-19 testing, taking the total number of facilities operating in the state to 201, of which 135 are owned by private firms and 66 are government-run. Tamil Nadu does not use Rapid Antigen Diagnostic Tests (RADT) and all the tests are RT-PCR (Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction based).
(With inputs from PTI)