Coronavirus: four deaths, 324 new cases announced on Friday (Updated)

The health ministry announced four deaths and 324 new Covid-19 positives on Friday from 56,420 PCR and rapid tests with a positivity rate of 0.57 per cent.

The deaths concerned four men aged 69, 72, 67 and 76. Only the 72-year-old was vaccinated with the first shot. It is no longer possible to know if those who died had underlying conditions as the ministry stopped reporting this.

There are 237 people in hospitals of whom 59 are in serious condition. Of the 59, thirty are intubated two are in ICUs but no on ventilators and 27 are in the high dependency ward.

As tests, there were 56,420 done in total; of which 50,500 were rapid tests and 5,920 were PCR tests.

And the cases, detected from the PCR tests, are as follows: 46 positives from 795 contact tracing tests, one from 2,183 tests at the airports, 63 from 2,572 taken privately and seven from 344 hospital tests.

Nine rapid tests from the 369 taken privately returned positive.

The government’s free rapid testing programme detected 198 cases from 50,131 tests.

The analysis per district is as follows: Famagusta had the highest positivity rate at 0.56 per cent with 15 positives (2,693 tests), followed by Larnaca’s 0.53 per cent with 31 positives (5,835 tests), Limassol’s 0.47 per cent with 55 positives (11,687 tests), Nicosia’s 0.41 per cent with 69 positives (16,871 tests), and finally; Paphos’ 0.40 per cent with 12 positives (2,967 tests).

Notably, just one care home test returned positive and 13 tests from 5,552 tests on workers were positive.