The number of persons tested positive for coronavirus and admitted to various hospitals in Tamil Nadu crossed the 234 mark by Wednesday evening, according to Beela Rajesh, Secretary, department of Health.
Speaking to reporters at Chennai, Rajesh said 110 persons tested positive on Wednesday alone. “All of these persons who returned from the religious congregation held at New Delhi. Efforts are on to identify and trace all the 1,103 persons from the State who had attended the congregation. The patients admitted to hospitals on Wednesday include two religious preachers from Myanmar and Indonesia respectively,” said the Health Secretary.
Officials of the department of health and local bodies are on a house-to-house search in Tamil Nadu to trace more than 500 persons who had attended the religious congregation held in New Delhi early last month and had gone missing since then. Most of them are feared to carry the deadly COVID- 19 the cause for corona disease.
The State’s efforts to control the spread of coronavirus pandemic went on a tailspin since Tuesday following a sudden spurt in the number of cases detected positive with COVID-19.
Tuesday alone saw 57 persons testing positive for corona virus and more than 50 of them were those who had attended the religious congregation in New Delhi. With the admission of 57 patients on Tuesday, the number of persons undergoing treatment for corona virus in the State has crossed the 125 mark. This includes ten foreign nationals who are religious preachers by profession.
This is the highest figure recorded in Tamil Nadu in a single day since the pandemic broke out in the country. The State has been one with minimum Corona positive cases ever since the administration commenced issuing bulletins about the number of patients tested with the pandemic.
Tamil Nadu, the focus of which was to prevent community transmission of the virus and was confident of checking the progress of local transmission to community transmission was seen fighting a see-saw battle as the number of positive cases shooting over the roof following the exodus from Delhi’s Nizamuddeen.
According to the office of the Chief Secretary K Shanmugham, 1131 persons had attended the religious congregation in New Delhi. “We have detected 515 of them and once we trace the remaining individiuals, we will be able to prevent the progress of corona virus in the State,” said Shanmugham.
The seriousness of the situation could be understood from the words of the State administration which accepted that the New Delhi returnees had turned the trajectory of COVID-19.
Chief Minister Edappadi Palaniswamy himself came out on Wednesday morning and paid a surprise visit to some of the Amma Restaurants in the city that offer subsidised food to the common man. Amma Restaurants were launched by late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa and this had earned her a lot of good will among migrant workers and low income employees because they could get breakfast/lunch/dinner for Rs five each.
Palaniswamy checked the quality of food served in the restaurants and asked the staff not to compromise on the quality of service and standards.