With the view to provide the Coronavirus testing for the people at free of cost, the Tamil Nadu government has said that it would bear the cost and expenses incurred by the private hospitals and laboratories on offering the free tests and it would reimburse the costs.

Tamil Nadu Health Secretary Beela Rajesh has announced the directive and said that the government would fix the cost of testing and reimburse the expenses to the government and the private testing facilities for providing free tests for the people in the wake of the outbreak. She maintained that the state has equipped with an adequate number of the testing kits and the delay in the arrival of the imported rapid testing kits won't cause a problem.

She stated that Tamil Nadu currently has 24,000 real-time RNA test kits and about 90,000 more kits would be added in the coming week. She divulged that the state has been initiating aggressive testing for the people who develop symptoms, who are infected by the Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI). According to the reports, Tamil Nadu has earlier placed an order to procure four lakh testing kits from China. However, the initial deployment of 50,000 kits to the state had been diverted to the United States.

The directive from the state government has come days after the Supreme court had passed an interim order concerning to provide free testing for the patients. The country's top court had ordered the Central government to provide free testing for COVID-19 in all the hospitals and labs which conduct the tests across the country. The court has instructed the healthcare facilities in the private sector to offer the free of cost testings for the affected patients and it also has noted that the people can't afford the price cap of Rs 4,500 for a test that was fixed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

Tamil Nadu had witnessed the sharpest rise in the number of affected cases due to the virus in its territory on Sunday. It has reported 106 cases positive for the virus, which is one of the highest single-day rises in the state. As of Sunday, the state has 1,075 positive cases of which 1,014 are active patients while fifty people have been recovered and discharged and eleven have succumbed to the virus. The positive cases include both Indian and foreign nationals. The state has tested 10,655 samples as of Sunday.