RISHARD KHAN
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

If it wasn't clear enough by Tues­day's 576 new­ly con­firmed COVID-19 cas­es that in­fec­tions are on the rise in the coun­try, the Min­istry of Health is con­firm­ing that the coun­try is now record­ing 85% more dai­ly cas­es on av­er­age, com­pared with two weeks ago.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­is­ter of Health, Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, the coun­try's rolling av­er­age has in­creased sig­nif­i­cant­ly over the last two weeks and spells trou­ble for the fu­ture:

"In 14 days, we moved from a rolling sev­en-day av­er­age of 238 to 440 [cas­es]. If we con­tin­ue like this... we go back to the days of 700, 800, 900 cas­es per day, which is where we don't want to go."

Pre­sent­ing da­ta on the coun­try's out­break, Dr Av­ery Hinds from the Min­istry of Health's epi­demi­ol­o­gy di­vi­sion said the in­crease is more clear­ly seen when ag­gre­gat­ed by week­ly cas­es.

"From [week] 15 to 16, there's ac­tu­al­ly a 24 per cent in­crease and we are cur­rent­ly still at the start, for all in­tents and pur­pos­es, of epi week 17," he said.

Dr Hinds said this week is pro­ject­ed to wit­ness even fur­ther in­creas­es.

"Epi week 17 is al­ready near­ly the height of the pre­vi­ous and if we con­tin­ue at the cur­rent rate, we may end up with ap­prox­i­mate­ly 3,000 cas­es just for the week, which would be about a 31 per cent in­crease over the pre­vi­ous week," he said.

His da­ta al­so in­di­cates the pos­i­tiv­i­ty rate is on the rise as well. At the start of April, rough­ly 28 per cent of tests were re­turn­ing pos­i­tive re­sults. This week, that fig­ure is at 44 per cent. The pos­i­tiv­i­ty rate is an in­di­ca­tor of the lev­el of virus in cir­cu­la­tion among the pop­u­la­tion.

On a month­ly scale, Dr Hinds said April is set to record just about the same num­ber of cas­es as March. This will break the trend of sig­nif­i­cant­ly few­er cas­es be­ing re­port­ed month­ly since De­cem­ber.

"The rate at which we're drop­ping has di­min­ished tremen­dous­ly which could sig­nal, ba­si­cal­ly, what we call a turn­around. We're chang­ing di­rec­tion," Hinds said.

He said this is cause for ad­di­tion­al con­cern and war­rants ad­di­tion­al cau­tion by the pop­u­la­tion.