Chennai: While clearing the air that there was no detection of ‘XE’ variant of Covid-19 in Tamilnadu, the government has however advised the airport authorities to intensify surveillance at international airports.
Health Minister Ma Subramanian said the Health department has directed officials in districts to take up contact tracing even if one infection was detected in a region.
Speaking to the media, he said, ‘Tamilnadu has been reporting fewer than 50 COVID-19 cases a day for the last 10 days, and fewer than 100 cases for a month. There have been no deaths for nearly a month. We continue to send samples for genomic sequencing, and we have not found the XE variant so far in the State.’
He added that fever screening was being done at airports. Depending on the body temperature of passengers, testing for Covid-19 would be done immediately.
Subramanian noted the government was performing Whole Genomic Sequencing (WGS) analysis of those individuals who had tested positive.