Averaging 1500 corona cases a day, Telangana likely to touch 50k mark soon
Hyderabad: Telangana is about a week away from hitting the 50,000 mark in Covid-19 cases with the state reporting around 1,500 new coronavirus cases a day.
On Thursday, the state registered 1,676 cases taking the total number of Covid-19 cases to 41,018 at 5 pm.
Ten more people were killed by Covid-19 on the day taking the number of dead so far to 396.
The number of active cases as on Thursday were 13,328 while the number of ‘discharged/recovered’ so far has reached 27,295, the daily Covid-19 bulletin issued by the health department said.
Thursday was the first time that the state government indicated that not everyone being sent home has recovered from the disease but many are discharged after not showing Covid-19 symptoms for a given number of days.
Only when a patient enters the very serious infection stage and manages to pull back to recovery, is he or she tested for a negative Rt-PCR test before discharge. For others who are discharged, absence of symptoms means an assumption that the disease is harmless in them but they are let go without the final relief that comes from a negative test.
The state said that so far it has conducted 2,08,666 tests of which 14,027 were conducted on Thursday. No details were provided as to how many of these were the gold standard Rt-PCR test and how many were Rapid Antigen Tests that are not considered a fool proof Covid-19 testing method.
The health department said of the total 17,081 beds it has set aside in its hospitals across the state, a whopping 15,389 were available. It also said that from the high of 495 patients in the ICU ward of Gandhi Hospital on Wednesday, the occupancy of beds in this critical care ward on Thursday dropped steeply to 113.
The GHMC area as usual had the single highest chunk of the day’s cases at 788 with Thursday’s tally for the rest of Telangana standing at 888 cases.
Karimangar, repeatedly touted by health minister, Etala Rajendar, as a model with respect to Covid-19 control, on Thursday recorded 92 cases, more than doubling its tally of 41 for Wednesday.
The increasing cases across the state in all the districts indicate that the Telangana government’s Covid-19 fighting resources can be expected to be stretched to their limits in the coming days.
