The active COVID-19 cases came down below the 70,000 mark for the first time during the last 12 days as 5,186 new positive cases, 38 deaths and 7,994 recoveries were reported during the 24-hour period till 5.30 p.m. on Saturday.
According to a bulletin issued by the Public Health Department on the status of COVID-19 cases, the fresh positive cases take the total infections to 4,92,385 so far in the State from March 2 last year when the first case of COVID infection was detected in Telangana. The fatalities due to the virus infection have also gone up to 2,704 after the first death with COVID-19 was reported on March 28 last year.
The number of active cases in the State has come come down below 70,000 to 68,462 on Saturday after they crossed the 70,000 mark on April 27 for the first time. The number of persons recovered from the infection has gone up to 4,21,219 with almost 8,000 persons declared recovered on Saturday.
The bulletin also indicated that the daily infection rate is also coming down slowly in the State as it stood at about 7.5% on Saturday with 5,186 infections reported out of 69,148 samples tested, although the High Court has been asking the State to increase the tests further. Of the samples tested on Saturday, nearly 50% (49.6%) were of the primary contacts and 12.5% belonged to the secondary contacts and the remaining 37.5% samples were of the persons who went for tests voluntarily.
Although the GHMC area remains the major contributor to the COVID-19 positive cases everyday, they remained below 1,000 mark for the second day in a row after they touched the four-digit mark on April 22 for the first time. On Saturday, 904 positive cases were reported from the GHMC area. Rangareddy district reported 399, Medchal-Malkajigiri 366, Nalgonda 317 and Warangal Urban reported 231.
In 13 districts, the positive cases reported on Saturday ranged between 100 and 200 and in another 15 districts they were below 100.