In a major spike of COVID-19 cases in Andhra Pradesh, 17 patients tested positive for the coronavirus since 9 pm on Monday, the state government said in a medical bulletin on Tuesday morning. With this, Andhra Pradesh now has 40 cases of COVID-19, of which 38 are active.
At least 11 of the 17 new patients had attended a religious congregation, hosted by the Tablighi Jamaat, in the Nizamuddin area of New Delhi earlier this month.
Three others are contacts of those who attended the meeting, while one had returned from Madina. The remaining two were contacts of a patient from Karnataka who had returned from Mecca.
"A total of 164 samples were tested since Monday night out of which 147 are negative and 17 are positive," the bulletin stated.
As per the bulletin, Prakasam district has 11 cases, followed by Guntur which has 9, Visakhapatnam with 6, Krishna with 5, and East Godavari with 4. Anantapur has two cases, while Chittoor, Kurnool and Nellore reported one case each. One patient in Visakhapatnam and one in Nellore have recovered.
30,693 people are under home isolation in Andhra Pradesh and 262 are admitted in hospitals. In total, the state has tested 748 samples so far, the bulletin added.
According to sources, the Andhra Pradesh government has identified 711 people in the state who had attended the meeting. Of them, 122 people were isolated in hospitals while 207 people were quarantined in state-run government centres. Another 297 were under home quarantine, while 85 people were either staying in Delhi or were yet to be traced.
The latest development comes even as Telangana on Monday night announced that six people had died of COVID-19 in the state, with all six of them having attended the religious congregation in New Delhi.
On Monday night, around 100 suspected coronavirus patients were evacuated from the Tablighi Jamaat's international headquarters in southwest Delhi in buses. They have been kept in isolation in the Narela area of Delhi. At least 24 positive cases of coronavirus from among those evacuated have been confirmed as of Tuesday morning.
(Published in an arrangement with The News Minute)
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