The number of new COVID-19 infections detected within a 24-hour period has doubled and authorities are monitoring this situation to determine whether the surge is as a result of the holiday weekend or the subject of something more serious.
This was expressed by Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony on Wednesday during his daily update on the Covid situation in the country. For Wednesday, the country saw 87 new cases.
“That is up from the 40 cases or so that we’d normally see, but I suspect that might be a little bit of backlog over the holidays, but we have to observe to see whether this is a trend and if cases are going to go up…currently we have 780 cases that are active,” Minister Anthony explained.
As of yesterday, there were 28 persons in the hospitals countrywide with six receiving care in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
To date, 10,499 adults have received a first dose of a Covid vaccine, while 294,160 or 57.3% per cent are fully immunised.
For children 12 to 17, 30,251 or 41.5% have a received a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine while 21,568 or 29.6% have received both doses. A total of 11,065 booster doses have been administered.
Meanwhile with the threat of the Omicron variant, the Minister underscored the importance now, more than ever, of following the safety guidelines including the wearing of facemask.
In this regard, he noted that cloth masks are the least effective.
“Because the pores in cloth, they are really big and viral particles can easily pass through the cloth masks and if you wear a cloth mask and you’re in close proximity with someone who is been infected Covid and you breath the air…there is that possibility that you can get infected although you are wearing a cloth mask,” Dr Anthony highlighted.
According to him, surgical masks are more effective.
“Although it may look relatively thin, most of them are made of three layers and with those three layers, it is harder for a viral particle to pass through those layers. Some persons, if they believe that they are in a high-risk environment…in some cases, are wearing double mask and that then give them six layers.”
“The highest form of protection that one can get is to use the N95 masks. N95 means that 95 per cent of the viral particles would be prevented from passing through the masks and in some cases, while they say N95, it’s actually about 99 per cent effective…and N95 would actually have five layers,” the Minister explained.
