Active Covid-19 cases in the country have rapidly increased after a record 788 persons have tested positive in 24-hours. This was derived from 1878 tests that were conducted.
Only yesterday, a whopping 485 persons had tested positive.
As a result, the country currently has 2,554 active cases.
Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony has lamented that this surge is as a result of the Omicron variant.
“So, as we anticipated with Omicron, what will see because of its contagiousness, is an increase in cases especially if people are not abiding by the public health measures and that is wearing masks and so forth consistently,” Dr Anthony expressed.
“We were able to detect 788 new cases and this came from 1878 tests, so the positivity rate has gone up so it’s about 41.95% and that shows that we have a lot of people getting positive very quickly,” he added.
In light of this current surge, the Health Minister was asked whether the country has enough capacity to test for these cases.
“We have a lot of capacity at the National Public Health reference lab. I think we have the capability of doing at least 2000 PCRs over a 24-hour period, that’s fairly large. We also have gene-experts’ machines that we have placed at the various regional hospitals so they can do some amount of testing there and with antigen testing, it doesn’t require much of an infrastructure, just the test kits. We have adequate test kits across the public health system and they are being used.”
“So, I don’t think, in this point in time, that we will be overwhelmed. In addition, we have more than twelve private facilities that have been certified to do testing, so it’s a mixture of PCR and antigen testing.”
A total of 59 persons are hospitalised with this life-threatening illness with five receiving treatment in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
The country has also recorded two deaths in the last 24-hours.
So far, 412,288 or 80.4% of adults have received a first dose of a Covid vaccine while 297,286 or 58% have received two doses of the Covid vaccines.
For children 12 to 17, 30,580 or 41.9% have received a first dose of the Pfizer vaccines while 21,833 or 29.9% are fully inoculated.
In terms of booster doses, 13,234 persons have received their jabs.
