Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said Tamil Nadu’s COVID-19 case doubling time was 217 days, while that of India was about 131 days for the last three days.
After a meeting to review the COVID-19 situation with Tamil Nadu Health Minister C. Vijayabaskar through video conference on Wednesday, the Union Minister tweeted that he complimented the State on robust surveillance, scale-up of diagnostic capacity and low case fatality rate. “It was heartening to make note of their at par or better performance than the national average on various indicators,” he said.
“While the growth rate is 0.5% at the national level, the growth rate in Tamil Nadu is 0.4%. At the country level, we have the highest recovery rate in the world at 90.85%,” he said. The recovery rate in Tamil Nadu is even higher than the national average, and is about 94.5%,” he said at the review meeting.
The Minister added that the fatality rate of India as well as Tamil Nadu remained 1.5%. At the national level, the sample positivity rate was 7.6%, while it was 7.3% in the State, he said.
“I would like to congratulate you as Tamil Nadu is probably one State where the example is worth emulating...as you are doing only RT-PCR tests, which is a good indication,” he said.
Health Secretary J. Radhakrishnan, Tamil Nadu Medical Services Corporation Managing Director P. Umanath, Joint Secretary (Health) A. Sivagnanam, Mission Director of National Health Mission-Tamil Nadu K. Senthil Raj and Directors T.S. Selvavinayagam (Public Health and Preventive Medicine), S. Gurunathan (Medical and Rural Health Services) and R. Narayana Babu (Medical Education) were present at the meeting.
