COVID19: One more death raises Cyprus toll to 20, new cases rise to 25

Cyprus reported one more death directly as directly linked to the Covid19 pandemic on Tuesday, raising the toll to 20 and the total deaths of all cases infected with SARS-CoV-2 to 27.

The latest death was a 77 year old man, reportedly with an underlying medical case, bringing the average age for all deaths to 71 years.

Tuesday also reported a rise in new infections to 25, with four of these traced to travellers from Greece and 13 from contact tracing.

This brings the total of coronavirus infections in Cyprus to 1,277, with five patients being treated at the Famagusta reference hospital.

Tuesday’s rise in cases follows an announcement earlier in the day with the minister of health and the scientific advisory committee saying that the spread of the coronavirus seems to be thinning and the situation seems to be improving, allowing for a partial relaxation of measures for the port town of Limassol that had seen a disproportionate increase in Covid19 infections in recent weeks.

Cyprus saw an upsurge in new cases ever since it opened its gates to foreign travel on August 1 in an effort to kick-start the struggling tourism sector, the biggest earner of the island’s economy.

From single-digit cases, mostly imported from repatriated Cypriots, the recent weeks have seen an upsurge in local transmissions that worried the health ministry officials, with daily cases often rising to double-digit figures, not seen from the onset of the pandemic and the lockdown that Cyprus imposed, shutting its airports and sea ports.