BATON ROUGE - Governor John Bel Edwards announced that an estimated 7,000 of Louisiana's more than 20,000 coronavirus patients have recovered as of April 15.

The governor gave the data during his daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday. Edwards said modeling suggests an estimated 7,044 people in the state have recovered.

While the governor says the number is not an "exactly precise" tally, he said it is based on the number people who have tested positive and gone a certain amount of time without symptoms.

State officials have been regularly questioned about the number of people who had recovered from COVID-19 in recent weeks. Until Wednesday though, they had declined to share those numbers based on a lack of reliable data.