COVID-19 cases exceed 5,000; over 800 active

Guyana’s COVID-19 cases on Friday jumped to 5,005 with 29 more persons testing positive.

According to the Ministry of Health’s daily dashboard, the new cases were recorded as follows: seven in Region One, one in Region Three, 15 in Region Four, one in Region Five, one in Region Six, three in Region Seven, and one in Region Ten.

There are nine persons in intensive care, 768 persons on home isolation and 101 persons in institutional isolation totalling 878 active COVID-19 cases.

To date, 3,984 persons are recovered.

Health Minister Dr. Frank Anthony on Friday lauded the rate of recovery. “I think our rate of recovery has been quite good, our challenge really is a small percentage of people –20% or so who require hospitalization and a smaller percentage of people, like 4% who require ICU care…–we’ll lose them so it is still a challenge,” he noted.

Recently St Cuthbert’s Mission on the west bank of the Mahaica River, Region Four recorded a spike in positive cases; this community followed Kwebanna in Region One and proceeded on a total lockdown.

On Friday, Dr. Anthony said there have been no new cases in Kwebanna for the past week and the cases in St Cuthbert’s Mission have significantly decreased.

However, he is urging persons to remain vigilant and maintain sanitizing and social distancing practices.

“Even when they don’t have cases, we want to continue to work with them so that we can prevent. We prefer to prevent cases rather than to have to deal with people who are positive,” the Minister said.

Currently, there are 73 persons in institutional quarantine who are suspected of having the disease.

So far, a total of 26, 580 persons were tested for COVID-19 in Guyana.