Medical and healthcare workers in the struggle to tackle coronavirus at Nicosia General Hospital

COVID19: Cyprus cases on the up again, Syrian migrants, Serbian footballer

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Cyprus health authorities reported a jump in new cases of the Covid19 virus with seven instances reported on Sunday, breaking the month-long pattern of single or no cases of the pandemic reported daily.

This brings the total of coronavirus cases in the Republic to 1,021 and 19 deaths since the March lockdown.

The new cases included five Syrian migrants arriving earlier in the month via the occupied north of Cyprus and initially from Turkey, which has already reported 211,981 cases up to Sunday with 5,344 deaths.

The five Syrian refugees were tested from among 301 samples when they were sent to the Pournara migrants’ reception centre.

One case involved a hotel worker in Paphos, resulting from a voluntary scheme testing employees in the tourism and leisure industries, while the seventh case was that of a footballer returning from Serbia.

The footballer, playing for Doxa FC, had returned to Cyprus on Friday, and is now the third case of a football player from Serbia bringing the Sars-CoV-2 virus with him in the past ten days.

On Saturday, only one new Covid19 case was reported in Cyprus, resulting from the contact tracing method investigating people close to associated with a woman who had returned from Romania recently, whose mother was found to be positive with the coronavirus.

On Friday, one of the positive cases was an APOEL FC footballer who arrived on the island from Serbia three days earlier and underwent a test at the Nicosia club’s initiative.

APOEL issued a statement confirming their player tested positive, without naming him.

The Ministry said the Serbian player was diagnosed positive more than two weeks ago and tested negative three times before boarding a plane to Cyprus.