The Andhra Pradesh government on Tuesday constituted a nine-member State-Level Death Audit Committee on COVID-19 to examine all the case records to ascertain the cause of deaths pertaining to the victims of coronavirus.
The Committee, to be chaired by the Director of Medical Education, will conduct "verbal autopsy" with all the stakeholders to identify the cause of death, Special Chief Secretary KS Jawahar Reddy said in an order.
The committee would also analyse the trends and use the data to predict future trends, plan management strategies and suggest measures to reduce the mortality, the special chief secretary said.
The committee would submit its report to the state nodal authority for COVID-19 and the Commissioner of Health and Family Welfare, he added.
Till date, 31 people died of coronavirus in Andhra Pradesh. Majority of the cases had comorbidities like asthma, hypertension, diabetes and cardiac problems with a mortality rate of 2.46 percent (of the total cases), according to official sources.
As on Tuesday, the state registered 1,259 coronavirus positive cases, of which 970 were active. The total number of patients cured and discharged from hospitals increased to 258 as 23 were sent home in the last 24 hours ending 9 am on Tuesday.
Kurnool, the worst-affected district in Andhra Pradesh recorded 40 fresh cases, taking the overall count to 332. This was followed by the districts of Guntur and Krishna, which registered 17 and 13 new cases, taking their total to 254 and 223 respectively.
In Kurnool, 12 coronavirus patients were discharged while 10 were discharged in Guntur on Tuesday, the bulletin said.
The state now has 970 active COVID-19 cases. The bulletin said 5,783 samples were tested in the last 24 hours, taking the aggregate so far to 80,334. Of the total, 79,075 turned negative in the tests.
With over 1,400 tests per million population, the state government claimed that it has topped the country in conducting the COVID-19 screening. The Health department officials attribute the spurt in the number of cases to the increased testing.