With fatalities now at 701, Health Minister Dr. Frank Anthony is appealing to Guyanese to adhere to COVID-19 preventative measures, attributing the increase in cases and deaths to the Delta variant.
The Ministry of Health (MoH) yesterday disclosed that nine more persons who were infected with COVID-19 have died. In a statement, the Ministry said that six of the fatalities are men from Region Four with only one being fully vaccinated and another, partially vaccinated. Two women from Region Four also died, both were unvaccinated. A 66-year-old man from Region Three who was partially vaccinated was also among the fatalities.
According to the Minis-try, the nine died while receiving care at state medical institutions. Based on the statistics provided by the Ministry, 76 persons have already died after contracting the virus this month.
During yesterday’s COVID-19 update, Anthony said, Guyana has recorded 3,368 active cases, with 313 cases on Tuesday alone. Of those active cases, 1,955 are from Region Four and 805 from Region Three.
However, the daily dashboard showed that 298 cases were recorded yesterday from 2, 508 tests done. Of this number 203 are from Region Four, 75 from Region Three, 12 from Region Five, seven each from regions Two and Seven, five from Region Six, three each from regions One and Nine and one from Region Ten.
“So, again, I hope that people are paying close attention to these numbers because unless you take precautions, and those are the standard precautions that we’ve been talking about: masking and social distancing and sanitising, and of course getting vaccinated, if you don’t abide by these rules, unfortunately, you are going to get infected and if you’re unvaccinated, you can end up in the hospital”, he warned.
In addition, the dashboard showed that 31 persons are in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit, 142 in institutional isolation, 3000 in home isolation and 19 in institutional quarantine.
Of those in institutional isolation, 99 are at the Ocean View facility and 17 are at the GPHC’s Obstetrics Department.
Meanwhile, some 534,108 doses of COVID vaccines have been administered to the population to date. Some 19,131 doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been given to children ages 12 to 17. For the adult population, 339,206 (66.1%) have taken the first dose, while 175,848 (34.3%) are now fully vaccinated against the virus.
