The coun­try record­ed over 300 COVID-19 cas­es for the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive day yes­ter­day when the Min­istry of Health con­firmed 335 cas­es from sam­ples col­lect­ed be­tween Oc­to­ber 31 and No­vem­ber 3.

It came just one day af­ter the min­istry con­firmed the high­est jump in cas­es since June 9 when it record­ed 393 cas­es on Wednes­day.

The new in­fec­tions make it 1,320 cas­es to be con­firmed since Sun­day.

In To­ba­go, the is­land record­ed it high­est jump in new in­fec­tions with 55 cas­es re­port­ed in 24 hours, the most since the pan­dem­ic be­gan.

The cas­es aren’t out of the blue as the Min­istry of Health’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion’s Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor, Dr Av­ery Hinds, ex­plained last week that COVID-19 cas­es were on the in­crease since ear­ly Oc­to­ber. Last month’s to­tal COVID-19 cas­es of 6,620 sur­passed the month­ly to­tals for Ju­ly, Au­gust and Sep­tem­ber- the plateau months of this cur­rent wave of in­fec­tions.

Dr Hinds then cau­tioned that this steady in­crease could catal­yse an­oth­er spike if the pop­u­la­tion did not fol­low the pub­lic health pro­to­cols and get vac­ci­nat­ed. While Dr Hinds was more re­served in his pre­dic­tion by stat­ing it as a pos­si­bil­i­ty, the Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion’s pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cer Dr Kee­gan Bhag­gan viewed the spike as im­mi­nent and in­evitable giv­en the now wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ing Delta vari­ant among the pop­u­la­tion. He said a sharp in­crease in in­fec­tions af­ter a pe­ri­od of plateau­ing was wit­nessed in every coun­try whose pop­u­la­tion the vari­ant took root.

The Min­istry of Health al­so re­port­ed 10 ad­di­tion­al COVID-19 fa­tal­i­ties yes­ter­day; four el­der­ly males, three el­der­ly fe­males and three mid­dle-aged males. These fa­tal­i­ties make some 43 peo­ple who lost their lives to COVID-19 with­in the first four days of No­vem­ber and since Sun­day make it 57 deaths in just five days. The pan­dem­ic’s death toll lo­cal­ly now stands at 1,739.

Ac­cord­ing to the min­istry’s re­lease, eight of the pa­tients who died yes­ter­day had mul­ti­ple co­mor­bidi­ties in­clud­ing di­a­betes, high blood pres­sure, kid­ney dis­ease, can­cer and heart dis­ease. It said two of the fa­tal­i­ties had on­ly one co­mor­bid­i­ty, hy­per­ten­sion and can­cer re­spec­tive­ly.

The num­ber of cas­es re­main­ing ac­tive in­creased to 5,243- just 315 cas­es shy of what it was when Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley first called the State of Emer­gency on May 15, days ahead of this coun­try’s most se­vere and dead­liest spike in cas­es.

There were al­so 327 pa­tients hos­pi­talised across both is­lands with 25 and 12 pa­tients ward­ed in the In­ten­sive Care Unit (ICU) and High De­pen­den­cy Unit (HDU) re­spec­tive­ly at the Cou­va Med­ical and Mul­ti-Train­ing Fa­cil­i­ty.