Thiruvananthapuram, Jul 24 (IANS): Kerala continued to lead the rest of the country in terms of daily Covid cases, as 18,531 people turned positive in the state after 1,55,568 samples were tested in the past 24 hours, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said in a statement here on Saturday.

A total of 98 persons lost their battle against Covid-19 in the past 24 hours, taking the state's overall Covid death toll to 15,969.

In a glimmer of hope, the test positivity rate, which stood at 13 per cent on Friday, dropped to 11.91 per cent on Saturday.

According to the Covid data released on Friday, Kerala had accounted for 45 per cent of the total cases in the country.

The number of active cases in the state stood at 1,38,124 on Saturday, which is quite high when compared to the national figures.

The Chief Minister said that a total of 15,507 persons recovered from the disease on Saturday, taking the southern state's total number of recoveries to 30,99,469.

Since the outbreak of the second wave of the pandemic, Kerala has been observing a total lockdown on weekends. Since Friday, the lockdown norms have been tightened further to check the rising number of daily cases.