Chennai: Thanks to the sustained efforts of the government, Tamilnadu has successfully tackled three waves of Covid-19, Health Minister Ma Subramanian informed the State Assembly.
Moving the demand for grants for his department, he said world has been challenged by the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic.
The government declared the threat of outbreak of Covid-19 in Tamilnadu under the Tamilnadu Public Health Act, 1939 and notified the Tamilnadu Covid-19 Regulations, 2020 under the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 and also under the Disaster Management Act, to prevent the outbreak of
Covid-19.
He said when this government took over the administration on 7 May 2021, the total positive cases in a day was 26,465. Subsequently the second wave peaked up to 36,184 on 20 May, 2021,
The government has given thrust to Covid management as its first priority and imposed lockdown when inevitable, increased the health infrastructure, conducted focused reviews followed by field inspection which helped in reducing the case load, the Minister said.
Oxygen management was improved in co-ordination with the government of India. To control the increasing number of cases, the government took multi-pronged steps including rapidly augmenting the oxygen bed facilities, ICU’s, setting up temporary bed facilities and additional Covid care centres, monitoring and enforcing Covid appropriate behaviour, setting up of State and District level war room, putting in place additional human resources to quickly bring the spike under control.
Recalling various steps taken by Chief Minister M KStalin in controlling the virus spread, Subramanian said in Tamilnadu, the third wave of Covid-19 started in the last week of December 2021.
In this wave, maximum daily cases of 30,744 was recorded on 22 January, 2022. The majority of Covid cases reported in third wave are found to be Omicron variant. The most cases presented as mild symptomatic and for mild cases home treatment was advised.
Due to timely interventions, the daily cases have come down substantially and
at present, the daily cases have come down to less than 30 in Tamilnadu this
month.