COVID19: 1,330 deaths in three years

Cyprus reported four COVID-19 deaths on Friday, four less than last week, with a drop in new infections, while a systems failure could not calculate the number of hospitalisations.

The health ministry said in its weekly bulletin that the latest victims were two men and two women aged 73 to 81, while a further 21 deaths in 2021 were retrospectively attributed to the coronavirus.

This raised the death toll since the pandemic started three years ago in March 2020 to 1,330.

The number of new cases dropped significantly to 1,592, from 2,062 last week and higher than the 1,516 a fortnight ago. Of these, 41 were positive in targeted testing in care homes, six in closed institutions and just three in primary, high schools and special schools.

Last week, some 48 COVID patients were in hospital and 12 had been in a critical state.

The health ministry said that “due to a technical problem, the data for hospitalisations is not available this week.”

Daily average at 227

Coronavirus infections since the pandemic started rose to 650,685.

The average daily rate of infections remained below 300 and dropped to 227 from 294 the week before.

Testing was significantly below last week’s level, reaching 52,818 PCR and rapid antigen tests, about 16,500 less than before.

These two factors prompted the benchmark ‘positivity rate’ to continue to increase to 3.01% from 2.97% last week. The infection rate remains three times higher than the safe rate of 1%.

Masks remain mandatory in hospitals, testing labs and pharmacies.

Free government testing sites are only available at state hospitals for visitors.