The number of persons, who had tested positive for COVID-19 in the city on Friday, stood at 159. On June 11, the number was 627.
Of the many reasons for the more than one-fourth reduction in daily positive case one was the Coimbatore Corporation keeping tab on persons who bought without prescription the medicines used to treat COVID-19, said sources.
Drug stores
The Corporation keeping track of such persons started a few days ago with the civic body issuing a release asking drug stores to not give over the counter the drugs prescribed for treating the infection and note down the details of persons who bought medicines to treat fever, cough or other influenza like infection (ILI).
Scan centres
The sources said the Corporation had also liaised with scan centres for details of persons going for scan to check their COVID-19 status.
Since the initiative began, the Corporation had tracked down more than 150 such persons asking them if they showed ILI symptoms or sending teams to collect their swab samples. This helped in early detection and reflected in the reduced COVID-19 case count in the city.
One of the issues the Corporation faced in tracking such persons was that many were from outside the city limits and the shops they bought the tablets were from within the city. The second was that when contacted, the medicine buyers had told the Corporation that they had taken their first or second dose of vaccine and to control the fever, they bought paracetamol. Without taking chances, the Corporation was doing all it could to verify such claims as well.
Positivity rate
The Corporation sources said in addition to the case count, the positivity rate had also come down – the number of people testing COVID-19 positive for every 100 samples collected. From 12.20% on June 11, the rate had come down to 5.66% on June 16.