chennai there is no reason to panic about the rising number of covid cases as the state has adequate experience infrastructure and medicines to deal with any surge tamil nadu health minister ma subramanian said on tuesdaythere is an increase in cases but there is no reason to panic he said fresh cases of covid 19 had been steadily increasing over the last two months although there were no major clusters requiring microcontainment measures he saidthe state would conduct a study to measure population immunity due to past infections and vaccinations against sarscov2 the virus responsible for causing covid19 infection subramanian said last week union health ministry officials wrote to health officials in the state asking them to initiate preventive measures on monday tamil nadu reported 76 new cases of covid19 taking the active cases tally to 402 fresh cases of covid19 dropped to two in january over the last few weeks cases have increased across india including tamil nadu subramanian saidserosurveillance will be conducted in 38 districts by the directorate of public health as part of its disease surveillance activities along with continuous monitoring of new cases variants hospitalisation and mortality rates previous surveys showed that nearly 90 of people carried immunity against the viral infection thats possibly why we have fewer hospitalisations and deaths over the last six to eight months we will repeat this study now he said the health department will also administer vaccination to healthcare providers as a preventive measure to boost immunity he saidmore international passengers particularly those from countries such as kuwait and singapore were testing positive for covid19 he said the state conducts rtpcr randomly on two percent of international passengers as per the guideline from the union ministry over the past few days up to six passengers tested positive every day compared two patients once in three days a month ago on an average the state draws samples from at least 35000 people a week for rtpcr