Chennai, April 10 (B PNS)
Tamil Nadu health minister Ma Subramanian said that masks will be made compulsory in the state only if there is a surge in Covid -19 cases. The state health minister while speaking to reporters in Chennai on Monday said that the present wave of Covid -19 need to be feared at all as it was a milder version of the earlier Covid waves.
The minister was responding after inspecting the Covid mock drill at the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital on Monday. When asked why the state was not making insisting on Covid 19 protocol, while some other states have already implemented this, the minister said, “ In Tamil Nadu the number of daily cases has touched only 350 while in other states it has touched 500 and hence such a decision would be taken based on surge in cases.”
He said, “If cases rise ,we will definitely look into norms related to making masking mandatory ,especially in public places.”
Ma Subramanian told reporters that daily cases were rising slowly in the state at the rate of 10 or 20 increase per day and added that if the surge was like in Kerala or Maharashtra,Covid-19 norms would be implemented in public places.
The Tamil Nadu health minister said that a majority of those who are getting infected by Covid -19 are in home isolation and added that a very few are getting admitted in hospitals. He also said that there has not been a single case of admission in the ICU or usage of Oxygen beds.
The minister however said that there were 64,281 beds that were ready for any eventuality and added that of this 33,664 were Oxygen supported beds,22,820 were non- oxygen beds and 7797 were intensive care unit beds.
He said that the state’s liquid oxygen storage capacity stood at 2067 metric tonnes and added that there were 342 RT- PCR testing centres in the state.
The minister said that Tamil Nadu has the capacity to test 3 lakh people a day but was testing only 4000 people and would soon be hiked to 11,000 cases a day.
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