Highest positivity, slow recoveries, low testing: Telangana's worsening Covid-19 stats

HYDERABAD: There were red flags raised by the Centre and periodic censures by the courts, but Telangana continues to top charts with India’s highest Covid-19 positivity rate of 18.7%, while reeling in low charts with one of the country’s lowest recovery rates of 46.56%.
On Thursday, India’s average positivity rate stood at 6.68%, while the recovery rate amounted to 59.52%. As against the national average mortality rate of 2.95%, Telangana reported 1.54% mortality.

Telangana also continues to be among the states with the lowest tests per million population at 2,361 tests to emerge the second-lowest after Bihar that topped the charts with India’s lowest tests per million population at 1,859 tests.

By Thursday morning, Telangana reported testing 92,797 samples to date, of which 17,357 were returned positive. The state by Wednesday evening reported discharging 8,082 persons while reporting 9,008 active cases and 267 Covid deaths.

Telangana government, which has stopped tests from June 26 citing capacity constraints and thousands of piled up samples with the government laboratories waiting for tests, is yet to resume the tests. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi government headed by chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has blamed the private labs for the sharp rise in the number of positive cases, accusing them of contaminating the samples and for the disparity in numbers

After the Telangana government found problems with the testing protocols, human resources, infrastructure and infection control measures at some private labs where testing for infection was being done, the private labs have also suspended Covid-19 tests.

Hearing public interest litigations filed by civil society bodies, the Telangana High Court has pulled up the TRS government for not following its orders to increase the number of tests amid rising Coronavirus spread and a spike in positive cases. On Wednesday, the High Court bench headed by chief justice Raghavendra Singh Chauhan threatened to initiate the contempt proceedings against the government, while giving time till July 17 to submit its reply.

In contrast, the neighboring Telugu state Andhra Pradesh tested 9,32,713 samples so far to emerge the third Indian state in the high number of tests after Tamil Nadu with 12,02,204 tests and Maharashtra with 9,95,343 tests by Thursday morning.

Emerging among the six states with the lowest positivity rates, Andhra reported a 1.73% positivity rate by Thursday. The others in a similar range of low positivity rates of below 2% include Chhattisgarh (1.8%), Himachal Pradesh (1.2%), Jharkhand (1.73%), Kerala (1.92%), and Punjab (1.83%).

Andhra, however, reported India’s lowest recovery rate of 45.43% with 7,313 persons so far recovered and discharged with 8,586 outstanding active cases by Thursday. The mortality rate of AP stood at 1.23% with 198 Covid deaths to date.