Nine more lives were lost to COVID-19 as the Min­istry of Health re­port­ed a fur­ther climb in deaths on Sun­day.

The Min­istry al­so record­ed an in­crease in ac­tive COVID cas­es af­ter 356 cas­es were re­port­ed yes­ter­day, con­tin­u­ing a wor­ry­ing trend in this coun­try’s case man­age­ment and num­bers.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Health, nine peo­ple died yes­ter­day from the virus. It’s the third-high­est jump in deaths to date, the high­est be­ing 21 which was record­ed last week.

Six of those who died had co­mor­bidi­ties. They were three el­der­ly males, one el­der­ly fe­male and a mid­dle-aged man and woman.

Two mid­dle-aged men and one mid­dle-aged woman with­out co­mor­bidi­ties al­so died from the virus.

Fifty-two peo­ple are cur­rent­ly at the high de­pen­den­cy unit at the Cou­va hos­pi­tal.

Sun­day al­so saw the sev­enth-high­est jump in cas­es.

There are 382 peo­ple cur­rent­ly in the hos­pi­tal.

Mean­while, in To­ba­go, an­oth­er COVID-19 death was record­ed.

A 62-year-old woman with co­mor­bidi­ties died.

This brought the num­ber of COVID-re­lat­ed deaths on the is­land to four.

This was ac­cord­ing to the May 16 re­lease from the Di­vi­sion of Health, Well­ness, and Fam­i­ly De­vel­op­ment.

The re­lease said in the pre­vi­ous 24 hours there were 13 new COVID cas­es, bring­ing the to­tal num­ber of ac­tive cas­es to 77.

Four ad­di­tion­al per­sons were dis­charged.

Ac­cord­ing to health of­fi­cials, con­tact trac­ing re­vealed that peo­ple most like­ly be­came in­fect­ed af­ter con­tact with fam­i­ly mem­bers or work col­leagues.