Tamil Nadu on Monday became the fourth State, after Maharashtra, Kerala and Karnataka, to cross a total of one million COVID-19 cases. The number of people who have so far tested positive account for roughly 1.3% of the total population.
With 10,941 cases reported on Monday, the State took just 14 days to go from nine lakh cases to 10 lakh cases. An analysis of the number of days it took to cross every one lakh case showed that this was the shortest period taken to add one more lakh to the tally, indicating the sharp rise being seen during the second wave of the pandemic.
The second shortest was in July-August last year during the first wave when the State moved from two lakh cases to three lakh cases in 16 days. The highest daily tally of 6,993 cases wave was reported on July 27, 2020.
Cases reported daily during the second wave, which began in the middle of March, have crossed the 10,000-mark in the past two days. The number of active cases more than tripled from 23,777 on April 5 to 75,116 on April 19.
A worrying trend during the second wave is the consistent increase in the test positivity rate (TPR), even as the number of persons tested continued to increase beyond one lakh. Tamil Nadu reported a TPR of 9.99% on Monday.
Tamil Nadu stood 11th in the number of tests performed per million (TPM) population. With a TPM of 2.69 lakh, the total number of tests conducted so far accounted for more than 25% of the population. The State has relied completely on RT-PCR tests, unlike most other States that opted for antibody tests too.
Though the State had a relatively low overall case fatality rate (CFR) of 1.31%, it stood 12th in the country and the value was higher than the national average of 1.19%. Deaths have begun to increase in the past two weeks, with more than 40 deaths reported in the last two days. The last time the State reported more than 40 deaths was during October 2020.
The analysis also showed that the percentage of people in the 13-60 age group testing positive had increased in the second wave after declining during the relatively lull period from November to February.
