Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 19, 2022 News
– May infections surpass total recorded in March & April
Kaieteur News – With the recent increase in COVID-19 infections recorded over the past week, cases in the month of May have now surpassed the total recorded for the entire months of March and April.
According to the Ministry of Health data, from May 1 to 17, a total of 538 persons have tested positive for the virus. While in March some 312 persons contracted the virus and approximately 224 contracted the virus last month.
Guyana started to record a surge in new cases at the end of December and this took a toll in January and part of February. At the end of January, approximately 20,293 cases were detected while over 2000 were recorded in February. The Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony along with other health authorities at that time had attributed the increase in cases to the easily transmissible variant called Omicron. During an emergency press briefing on the issue, the Minister had said, “Based on the current epidemiology, what we are seeing, we believe strongly that there is omicron here.”
The cases in May are currently increasing again and according to the Minister this is perhaps being fueled by a sub-variant of Omicron, the BA.2. The Minister during his last COVID-19 update stated “we have notice for the last four, five days an upward trend of new cases, and we have to be vigilant about that.”
With Omicron still circulating globally, the Health Minister added that there are a number of sub-variants that are in circulation that is causing cases to rise in different parts of the world. “So with the initial Omicron wave, you have a BA.1 and a BA.3 that were circulating. In January we would have seen a huge increase in cases and that was predominantly driven by a BA.1. Subsequent to that, we had a decline in those cases and then we have seen new sub-variants emerging, so one of the newest sub-variants is BA.2 which is now becoming very dominant globally. So we are seeing more countries in Europe, in the Americas have a BA.2 variant that is circulating. In the United States it is causing an increase in cases, increase in hospitalization and I think because we have such close contact with the US and other countries that eventually we would have those cases coming here as well,” he said in his interview.
According to Minister Anthony, health authorities will be monitoring these cases. “We are going to send some of these samples to do the genetic sequencing to determine exactly which type of variant we have circulating in Guyana,” he explained.
The Minister continues to encourage persons to get vaccinated and to wear their masks when going in public places.
Meanwhile, via its latest dashboard data, the Ministry on Wednesday revealed that within the last 24 hour period, a total of 94 cases have been recorded in the country. The cases which now bring the total number of confirmed cases to 64,020, were detected in Region Four which recorded 62 new infections, Region Six which recorded 19, Region Three which recorded 10, Region 10 which recorded two and Region Nine which recorded one.
The dashboard also shows that 15 persons are in institutional isolation and 429 are in home isolation. Additionally, 24 persons have recovered from the virus within the last 24 hours taking the total number of recovery to 62,346.
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Apr 19, 2024
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