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Cases plummet as COVID tests see big drop
The Hindu
Only 465 cases detected as tests fall by nearly 35,000
A sharp drop in COVID-19 cases was observed in Telangana on Sunday as the number of tests fell by around 35,000. Every day, over 1 lakh samples are examined, and in the past few days, around 700 positive cases are being detected. However, on Sunday, only 65,007 samples were tested and of them, 465 turned up positive. This drop in tests, and therefore, cases, is not unusual for a Sunday. The new 465 cases include 70 from Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) area, 42 from Karimnagar, 33 from Suryapet and 32 from Khammam. Apart from GHMC which is a urban locality, the remaining three districts have been recording comparatively high number of cases.![](/newspic/picid-1269750-20250217064624.jpg)
When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.