Hyderabad, Aug 20 (PTI)Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan on Thursday expressed concern over the estimates of a new study that at least six lakh people in the city may have been infected by coronavirus. Concerned on the numbers.Congratulations @ccmb_csir for your efforts to study the problems in depth, she tweeted, tagging a report on the findings of the study based on harvested sewage samples in the city.

Soundararajan, a medical doctor herself, had on Tuesday last stressed the need to conduct adequate numbers of COVID-19 tests in the state, saying eradication of the virus would be difficult without sufficient testing. The state's COVID-19 tally stood at 97,424 as of Wednesday night with the capital city continuing to remain the hotspot, accounting for a lion's share of the cases.

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Conducted by the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), the study saidon Wednesday said there may be at least six lakh people in the city who have been infected by coronavirus but a large number of them could be asymptomatic and need no hospitalisation.

In a joint effort, CCMB and IICT harvested the sewage samples of different sewage treatment plants (STPs) in the city to estimate the number of potentially infected individuals as those infected by SARS-CoV-2 shed virus not only through nasal and oral routes but also through faeces.

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According to the study which covered 80 per cent of the STPs in the city, nearly two lakh people are shedding viral materials.

Since only 40 per cent of the sewage in the city reaches STPs, this data was used to extrapolate the overall number of potentially infected people, which turned out to be approximately six lakh, that is, around six per cent of the population.

It included symptomatic, asymptomatic, and also recently recovered individuals in a time window of about 35 days, the CCMB has said adding the findings have been posted on preprint server MedRxiv, which is yet to be peer reviewed.PTI SJR

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)