COVID19: Cyprus cases spike, three local infections

In a worrying trend, Cyprus reported a jump in new daily cases of coronavirus with five incidents reported on Thursday, after zero infections 24 hours earlier.

Thursday’s positive cases involved, an arrival from Israel, a Canadian living in Cyprus who has returned from Iraq via Dubai, and more alarmingly, three locally transmitted infections.

The five COVID-19 cases were detected among 1,575 tests carried out on Thursday.

The passenger from Israel arrived after obtaining a special permit from the authorities, he provided a negative coronavirus test upon arriving on 21 July.

He later repeated the test at a private lab which came back positive.

The case was traced after 418 tests were carried out at private laboratories.

A second case involved a Canadian citizen returning to Cyprus from Iraq, via Dubai on Wednesday.

She had presented a negative antibody test which was not accepted and was tested at the airport, the only positive cased among 738 tests carried out on people returning to Cyprus and international arrivals.

Of more concern to health authorities are the three local infections reported to be close contacts and family members of a Cypriot woman found positive on Tuesday.

The infections were detected among 94 tests under contact tracing of known cases.

This brings the total of coronavirus cases in the Republic to 1,045 and 19 deaths since the March lockdown.

According to epidemiological data, no positive cases were detected from 152 lab tests on employees who went back to work during phase two and three of easing restrictive measures, or 93 tests carried out by the Microbiological Labs of general hospitals.