The State reported 620 new COVID-19 infections and seven deaths in the 24 hours ending Sunday morning, pushing the tally to 8,67,683 and the toll to 6,988.
The number of samples tested crossed the one-crore mark and reached 1,00,17,126 with a positivity rate of 8.66%.
The positivity rate of the 54,710 samples tested in the last 24 hours was 1.13%, the lowest in the past six months.
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Nearly 18.76% of the State’s 5.34-crore population have been tested in the last 10 months. In other words, 18 in every 100 persons have been tested. Andhra Pradesh is the fifth State to cross one crore tests, but it has the highest tests per million ratio at 1.87 lakh.
The State had begun testing in February by sending the samples of foreign returnees to Hyderabad. Later, it started testing the samples at the Sri Venkateswara Institute of Medical Sciences in Tirupati. Thereafter, the State gradually increased its testing capacities to about 80,000 per day, and the tests included RT-PCR, Truenat, NACO and Rapid Antigen. On October 29, as many as 88,778 samples, the highest in a day, were tested.
However, the exercise slowed down as it had taken 16 days to test the last million samples against 13 days each for the number of tests to increase by a million from 70 lakh and 80 lakh.
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The positivity rate of the last million samples tested came down to 1.65%, the lowest ever, as only 16,385 cases were detected. For the first million samples tested between February and July, the positivity rate was 1.84% and it increased to 13.21% for the second million and reached a peak of 16.86% for the fourth million.
Also, for the first time, the recovery rate crossed 98% to reach 98.23% as 3,787 patients recovered in the last one day. The total number of recoveries was 8,52,298 and the death rate stood at 0.81%. At present, there are only 0.96% active cases (8,397).
New cases and deaths
Krishna and Visakhapatnam districts reported two new deaths each, while Guntur, Chittoor and West Godavari reported one each. There were not fatalities in the remaining districts.
West Godavari and Guntur reported more than 100 new infections with their single-day tally standing at 107 and 101 respectively in the last 24 hours.
They were followed by Krishna (85), Chittoor (640), Kadapa (48), East Godavari (40), Nellore (39), Visakhapatnam (36), Vizianagaram (35), Prakasam (19), Anantapur (16), Kurnool (15) and Srikakulam (15).
The overall tallies are as follows: East Godavari (1,22,246), West Godavari (92,368), Chittoor (83,643), Guntur (72,847), Anantapur (66,670), Prakasam (61,446), Nellore (61,405), Kurnool (60,223), Visakhapatnam (58,152), Kadapa (54,326), Srikakulam (45,451), Krishna (45,342) and Vizianagaram (40,669).