CHENNAI: The city corporation’s burial ground records show that deaths in the city for the months of April and May in the last two years were higher than the deaths in 2020, Corporation Commissioner G Prakash told reporters in a press meet on Wednesday.
For instance, in April 2018, the city recorded 4,789 deaths, in April 2019 4,888. But it is only 3,754 in April 2020. Similarly for the month of May, 5,146 deaths were recorded in 2018, 5,738 in 2019 and 4,532 in 2020, he said.
“This may be due to various reasons but the bottom line is that deaths might be 10 times more if not for the various ground-level interventions undertaken,” he said.
Prakash was inspecting community intervention activities in the Tondiarpet zone. He also said that the usage of masks in the city was at 65-70%.
After various community interventions targeted at creating awareness among slum dwellers, the rate of infection in slums in Tondiarpet and Royapuram has gone down, he said. Now, in Tondiarpet, only 10% of the positive cases are from slums and in Royapuram only 8% cases come from slums, he added.
“In Tondiarpet, 363 streets of the total 2995 streets, which earlier recorded cases has been having no cases for the last 14 days,” he said.
He said that as on Tuesday, the city tested 10,300 samples and is set to increase in the coming days. “Although the testing has doubled, the number of positive cases have not increased equivalently but only slightly,” he said. So far, 3.65 lakh people have been placed under quarantine.