Surat: The coronavirus tally in Surat district rose to 28,192 on Wednesday with the addition of 298 new cases, the highest for a district in Gujarat in the last 24 hours, while it recorded almost an equal number of recoveries, the state health department said.
The death toll in the district increased to 938 with four new fatalities, it said.
Also, 297 patients – 190 of them in Surat city – were discharged from hospitals following recovery, the health department said in a release.
Among the fresh cases, 180 were reported from Surat city and 118 from rural parts of the south Gujarat district, it said.
Both the city and the rural parts reported two deaths each, it said.
The Surat civic body said it conducted tests on 666 construction laborers at various points where they assemble in the morning to get hired for work, and found two of them to be infected with the virus.
The civic body also distributed 1,591 face masks free of cost to these laborers.
Similar rapid antigen tests conducted on 76 inmates of an old-age home revealed that three of them had contracted the infection, the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) said.
The corporation said it has so far recovered over Rs 2 crore in the penalty from around 48,000 people for not following COVID-19-related norms.
The recovery rate in Surat city has risen to 90.1 percent with 19,385 patients having been discharged from hospitals so far, the SMC said.
A total of 816 patients are currently admitted in various hospitals in Surat for COVID-19 treatment, the SMC said.
It said 245 beds are occupied in two city-based government hospitals where 3,046 beds are available for COVID-19 patients.