Hyderabad, March 9: Health authorities in Telangana crossed a psychological milestone in the fight against Covid-19 with the number of tests surpassing the 90-lakh mark on Tuesday. With 32,189 tests conducted during the last 24 hours, the cumulative number mounted to 90,16,741.

It has been nearly a year since government laboratories in the state started conducting tests. It was on the direction of Telangana High Court in May last year that the government permitted private laboratories to conduct the tests.

Currently 20 government and 60 private laboratories are conducting RT-PCR/CBNAAT/TRUENAT tests while there are 1076 centres for Rapid Antigen testing. Kolkata Fire: Doctors Mull DNA Test to Identify Some Bodies.

The labs are conducting 35,000-40,000 tests a day. However, the health department has not been giving the break-up of nature of tests. Majority of the tests are believed to be Rapid Antigen tests.

Telangana's figure for samples tested per million population now stands at 2,42,255. Officials say the daily testing target for the state is 5,600 as per the WHO benchmark of 140 tests per million per day.

During the last 24 hours, 29,759 samples were tests in government labs and remaining 2,430 in private labs. India Crosses 2 Crore Mark in Cumulative Covid-19 Doses.

Meanwhile, the state reported 142 new cases, pushing the cumulative tally to 3,00,153.

Two more succumbed to the virus during the last 24 hours taking the death toll to 1,644.

The fatality rate remained 0.54 per cent against the national average of 1.4 per cent. While 44.96 per cent of the deaths occurred due to Covid, 55.04 per cent had comorbidities.

According to the daily media bulletin released by the health department,

Greater Hyderabad saw maximum number of cases at 31 followed by Rangareddy (12) and Medchal Malkajgiri (10). Four districts reported no cases while in the remaining 26 districts the daily count was in single digit.

A total of 178 people recovered during the last 24 hours, taking the cumulative recoveries to 2,96,740. The recovery rate improved to 98.86 per cent against the national average of 96.9 per cent.

The total number of active cases now dropped to 1,769 including 633 who were in home/institutional isolation.

Over 90 per cent of the beds in hospitals treating Covid cases remained vacant. As many as 8,100 beds out of 8,454 beds in 62 government hospitals were vacant. Similarly, in 215 private hospitals 6,825 out of 7,605 beds were vacant.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 09, 2021 11:52 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).