Sixty-five new COVID cases were recorded on Tuesday and Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony says that the recent increase can be linked to the flouting of COVID-19 guidelines over the holiday season.
The new cases were revealed through the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard which showed that the 65 new cases increased the total number of positive confirmed cases to 6,653. The cases came after 391 more persons were tested. As a result, a total of 42,132 persons have been tested for COVID-19 in the country so far.
There are now 438 active cases in the country, 55 of which are in institutional isolation while the other 378 cases are in approved home isolation. According to the dashboard’s regional breakdown, the majority of the new cases were recorded in Region Five with 35 new cases. Twenty-one new cases were recorded in Region Four, one in Region Six, four in Region Seven, and two in Region Ten.
Thirty-four persons are currently in institutional quarantine while seven more persons have recovered from the virus which increased Guyana’s recovered cases to 6,047.
Meanwhile, the health minister during his daily COVID-19 update stated that the country may now be seeing an uptick in cases based on what health officials have observed over the holidays. “You’re going to see cases going up as we do more testing but also because people were not complying with the guidelines. Some of the things we noticed over the holidays were people were in close proximity with each other and a lot of people were not wearing masks,” he explained.
He added that with such behaviour, there was the likelihood that many other persons were exposed to the virus.
