HYDERABAD: TELANGANA’S recovery rate is on the upswing and keeps increasing by a small percentage every day. On Saturday, it came up to 87.29 per cent. However, it can’t indubitably be said whether the rise in recovery rate indicates an improvement in the State’s Covid situation.
In fact, the government has been periodically reducing the number of Covid tests being conducted across the State. This, in turn, ensures a periodical decline in the number of fresh cases. When compared to this, the number for recoveries do not fluctuate much. As a result, on some days the recoveries are higher than the new cases.
As the calculation for recovery rate places the total number of Covid cases as the denominator and recovered cases as the numerator, the decline in new cases helps increase the recovery rate.
What the numbers say
While the State usually conducts around 52,000-54,000 tests in a day, the number changes widely across a month. For example, on Saturday, the State conducted only 46,657 tests, resuting in detection of 1,717 new cases, whereas the recoveries were more at 2,103.
On a few days, the State has conducted less than 40,000 tests, despite having the capacity to conduct more than 60,000 tests daily.
The testing number falls drastically especially on Sundays and public holidays. Since the start of this month, on two occasions, the number dipped drastically — on October 4 and Ocober 2, the number of tests conducted were 49,084 and 36,348, respectively.
A comparison done recently by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare among 22 States and UTs shows that the State’s cumulative positivity rate is second highest, at 7.38 per cent. The top three states are Bihar (2.61 per cent), Gujarat (3.3 per cent) and Jharkhand (3.82 per cent), according to the data released by the MoHFW.