A year of Covid-19: AP reports 8.9L cases, 7K deaths

It was March 12 last year when Andhra Pradesh reported its first case of Covid-19 after a 23-year-old Italy returned student tested positive in Nellore. Subsequently, he recovered from the virus.

The spread of the virus peaked in August and September 2020 with the state witnessing over 10,000 cases.

So far, the virus has claimed 7,179 lives in Andhra Pradesh. Chittoor district has reported the highest deaths (856) due to the virus followed by Krishna (681), Guntur (672), East Godavari (636), Anantapur (600), Prakassam (580), Visakhapatnam (567), West Godavari (542), Nellore (508), Kurnool (489), YSR Kadapa (463), Srikakulam (347) and Vizianagaram district reported 238 deaths.

Andhra Pradesh reported 174 fresh cases of Covid-19 on Thursday that took the overall caseload to 8,91,178. East Godavari and West Godavari districts in Andhra Pradesh have reported the highest number of Covid-19 cases with 1,24,542 and 94,372 respectively followed by Chittoor (87,855), Guntur (75,830), Anantapur (67,829), Nellore (62,525), Prakasam (62,229). So far Vizianagaram (41,172 cases) and Krishna (49,082 cases).

After a total of 8,82,841 recoveries and 7,179 deaths, the number of active cases in the state has now touched 1,158.

Officials of the Medical and Health Department said that Andhra Pradesh tested 1,44,03,941 samples with 269737 testes per million. The overall positivity rate in Andhra Pradesh is 6.11 percent with 8,91,178 cases while the overall mortality rate in AP is 0.8 percent. The overall percentage of recoveries from the virus is over 99 percent.

Though the lowest single-day tally of 30 infections in the few months was reported nearly a month ago, the daily tally began witnessing a spike since then.

An average of 113 new infections per day was reported in the past two weeks. In the past 24 hours, 174 new infections, the highest single-day tally in the past 50 days, were reported. The number of active cases almost doubled in the last two weeks.

Health department officials said appealed to people to wear face masks, follow social distancing and hand hygiene, and get vaccinated. In March 2020, Andhra Pradesh had no labs to detect the virus. But, few weeks after the detection of the first case, the medical facilities were augmented to handle the situation.