The total COVID-19 cases in Telangana reached 54,059 as 1,593 more swab samples tested positive for coronavirus on Saturday. Eight more COVID-19 patients died.
The daily media bulletin which is usually released in the night, was not issued on Saturday night. The media bulletin-with details recorded on Saturday-was issued on Sunday morning in a new format.
The new 1.593 cases includes 641 from Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), 171 from Rangareddy and 131 from Warangal Urban districts.
Out of the total 54,059 cases, 12,264 are active cases, 41,332 have recovered, and 463 COVID-19 patients have died.
New format
After the first COVID-19 case was reported in Telangana on March 2, multiple changes were made to the format of the media bulletins. In the new format issued on Sunday, the order in which positive cases, recoveries, deaths and other details has changed.
The significant addition is the list of government health centres where Rapid Antigen Tests are performed.
Till July 8, only RT-PCR tests were performed to detect coronavirus. There after, Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) were introduced. However, most of the people did not have information on where do they have to go to give samples for RATs. Scores of people stood in queues for long hours at major hospitals to undergo the tests.
The list of 320 Primary Health Centres (PHC), Community Health Centres (CHC), Area Hospitals, District Hospitals, as per districts where the RATs are performed was listed in the new format of the bulletin. This could help in distribution of crowd to all testing centres and avoid crowd at hospitals.
A total of 353425 tests to detect coronavirus were performed till date. However, distribution of number RATs and RT-PCR tests is not mentioned in the new format too.
