With 66 new cases in 24 hours till Sunday morning, there seems no respite for Andhra Pradesh in its battle against coronavirus as its total tally climbed to 2,627.
Briefly, for a few days last week, the state seemed to be turning the tide as single digit tallies were reported from almost all the hotspot districts. However, the past few days have yet again seen COVID-19 cases tending to be higher.
The state nodal officer reported that 47 new cases were detected in the preceding 24-hour cycle compared with Sunday tally.
A significant number of new cases were found to have travel history to the Koyambedu market in Chennai including 3 in Chittoor district and 8 in Nellore district. The since-closed Koyambedu market was identified as one of the biggest spreaders of COVID-19 in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, where positive cases tally has long crossed the 10,000-mark.
With evacuation flights landing in Andhra Pradesh over the past few days, a few of the hundreds of foreign returnees have tested positive. On Sunday, authorities reported that 17 new cases are of foreign returnees. Of these, 12 are from Kuwait, 3 from Dubai and 2 from Qatar.
One of the reasons attributed to the higher daily counts is the large number of tests in Andhra Pradesh. The state ranks behind Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu in terms of overall numbers of tests conducted, while in terms of testing ratios, it ranks below Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir.
On a positive note, the number of active cases has been slowly coming down in Andhra, with a third of the positive cases or 764 persons receiving treatment in various hospitals. A total of 29 persons were cured and discharged by Sunday morning, taking the state's tally of cured persons to 1,807.
The state nodal officer reported that 11,357 samples were tested in the past 24 hours as against 9,136 during the preceding cycle.
As no corona death was reported since Saturday morning, the state's death toll remained 56.
Meanwhile, the tally of cases among returnees from other states remained static at 153. However, the active cases tally fell to 119 from 128, as 9 more persons were cured and discharged. Of these, 8 persons had returned from Maharashtra and 1 from West Bengal. Previously, 25 persons from Gujarat had been cured and discharged.
( With inputs from IANS )