The district-wise data on COVID-19 testing, released by the Health and Family Welfare Department for the first time on Sunday, showed that roughly one in every four tests in the State was performed in Chennai.
The city, which accounts for close to 70% of the cases in Tamil Nadu, accounted for 23.13% of the tests performed in the State. Of the 5,27,212 samples tested as per the data released by the department, 1,21,950 were from Chennai.
While the tests conducted per million population (tpm) data for districts were released on a couple of occasions before, this was the first time that the State released the absolute number of tests performed in different districts. The data, however, did not reflect the latest figures and was based on information uploaded so far by all the laboratories on the ICMR portal, the medical bulletin said. Coimbatore stood a distant second with 22,872 samples tested, which is less than 20% of the tests performed in Chennai. As observed in the tpm data released earlier, there was no clear correlation between the number of cases and the number of tests.
Ariyalur which has the eighth-highest number of cases in the State, came last in terms of testing, with just 3,950 tests performed. On the other hand, Kanniyakumari, which ranked fifth in the number of tests performed (18,366), had only 87 cases, placing it at the 27th rank in terms of the number of cases. The testing to positive cases rate also varied widely between the districts, indicating how some districts were testing fewer numbers of contacts for every new case detected than other districts.
