Tamil Nadu on Thursday tested as many as 45,888 samples to detect coronavirus and the aggregate number of specimens examined crossed 17.80 lakh, the government said.
Sixty-nine people died of COVID-19 pushing the death toll to 2,236 and 4,549 people tested positive today, the highest single day increase so far.
The state’s tally of positive cases stood at 1,56,369 with the addition of new cases, a health department bulletin said.
Two men, aged 92 and 38, were among the dead and in total 63 had co-morbidities while six had none.
Recoveries continued to rise for the second day in a row with 5,106 patients getting discharged from various hospitals outnumbering fresh cases and on Wednesday, 5,000 people had got cured.
Over 5,100 people getting discharged is the highest so farin a single day. Cumulatively, 1,07,416 people have got cured till date.
With over 45,000 samples getting tested today, the total number of specimens scrutinised to find out the presence of the pathogen has gone up to 17,82,635.
Tamil Nadu has 107 labs, 54 in government and 53 in the private sector.
Chennai, which saw 1,291 fresh infections on Wednesday, today witnessed a dip, reporting 1,157 cases and the state capital accounted for 82,128 of the over 1.56 lakh cases in Tamil Nadu.
Since the first week of this month, Chennai’s count of daily infections has been witnessing a steady slide due to initiatives such as fever camps, door to door survey to detect people with flu like symptoms and an intensive lockdown for 17 days that ended on July 5.
As regards districts near here, Chengelpet has 8,908 cases, Tiruvallur 8,107 and Kancheepuram 4,310.
Among the southern districts, Madurai topped with 7,597 cases.
Chennai along with three neighbouring districts account for 66 per cent of all the virus cases reported so far.
For the first time on July 14, Tamil Nadu’s daily count of positive cases crossed the 4,500 mark and on that day the tally of new infections stood at 4,526.