Andhra Pradesh saw a jump in COVID-19 cases on Monday, with 75 people testing positive in 24 hours. With 3 more people losing their lives to the diseases, the state's death tally is now at 20.
The new cases bring the state total up to 722 cases, of which 610 cases are active at present. So far, 92 people in the state have been discharged after recovering.
According to the media bulletin released on Monday morning, 3,775 samples were tested in the 24-hour period between 9 am on Sunday to 9 am on Monday, of which 75 people’s tests returned positive.
The state has tested a total of 30,733 samples so far. The government recently imported 1 lakh antibody rapid testing kits to scale up testing. The kits are to be distributed to district level authorities. Krishna district collector Md Imtiaz on Sunday said that the district was expecting 8,500 test kits to arrive on Monday, of which 1,500 will be used to conduct tests on health workers.
The 3 deaths recorded since Sunday are from Anantapur, Krishna and Kurnool districts. Details of the patients who died are yet to be disclosed.
Andhra Pradesh government Special Chief Secretary (Health) had earlier announced that the government intends to ramp up testing as much as possible, aiming to conduct up to 5,000 tests per day, and eventually scale up to 10,000-15,000 tests per day. He said that increased testing is needed to ascertain the extent of infection at the community level within red zones.
The state government claimed to have set a record on Saturday by conducting 5,508 COVID-19 tests in a day, without using the rapid testing kits which are now available in the state.
Guntur and Kurnool remain the worst affected districts, with 149 and 174 cases respectively as of Monday morning.
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