The Coimbatore Corporation has designated the Athupalam electric crematorium to cremate COVID-19 victims.
Corporation Commissioner Sravan Kumar Jatavath said the relatives should cremate the deceased only at the crematorium and nowhere else in the city. For people whose custom was to bury the deceased, they could do so at any place of their choice provided they followed the State government-prescribed protocol.
To ensure that the protocol was being followed either at cremation or burial, the Corporation’s health inspectors would be present at the spot and the civic body had engaged on contract 32 persons with the requisite qualification for the purpose.
The health inspectors would also follow up health and sanitation work at places with COVID-19 positive persons, ensure that there were no COVID-19 precautionary guideline violations at containment zones, and coordinate with all private health establishments in the city that deal with the positive persons or test samples.
Mr. Jatavath said the Corporation felt the need to engage health inspectors because it had assessed a gap in coordination among various players combating the spread of COVID-19 and also to strengthen contact tracing.
The civic body had also engaged on contract 54 lab technicians who would be a part of the medical teams conducting fever clinics across the city. They would collect swab samples from persons who report with fever to the clinics and who the doctors at the clinics suspect of being COVID-19 positive.
In the absence of the lab technicians, the Corporation was forced to send its lab technicians who would be deployed elsewhere or go in search of the persons from whom it wanted to lift samples.
The fever clinics had proved useful in that the Corporation was easily able to identify persons with fever and influenza like infection (ILI).
For the public too, the clinic proved helpful as otherwise they delayed going to a neighbourhood clinic or hospital for fever to try home medication first.
Sources in the Corporation said the fever clinic had shown that 20% of the persons who showed up the clinic had ILI and of those two or three persons turned COVID-19 positive.
