Covid-19 positivity rate climbs for 2nd day

The percentage of the Covid-19 tests that come out positive continued to rise for the second consecutive day yesterday after it hit an eight-month low.

Against a total of 12,300 tests in the 24 hours ending at 8:00am yesterday, the positivity rate was 10.30 percent, up from the previous day's positivity rate of 9.19 against 14,336 tests.

On Thursday, the rate of daily positive coronavirus cases dropped to 8.6 percent against 13,191 tests, the lowest it has been in more than eight months.

Since the first three confirmed cases were reported on March 8 in the country, the transmission of Covid-19 was highest between June and July.

The highest daily positivity rate of 31.91 was recorded on August 3. It remained stagnant around 12 percent throughout September and October.

From November, however, it started rising again.

A high percentage of positive cases means that more testing should probably be done -- and it suggests that it is not a good time to relax restrictions aimed at reducing coronavirus transmission, according to John Hopkins University.

As a rule of thumb, the positivity rate is thought to be "too high" if it is more than five percent.

In May, the World Health Organization recommended that the positivity rate should be below five percent for at least two weeks before governments considered reopening.

With yesterday's 1,267 new infections, the total number of cases in the country rose to 4,99,560, according to a press release from the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).

Besides, the death toll due to the highly transmissible virus rose to 7,242 with yesterday's 25 deaths.

With this, the death rate stood at 1.45 percent.

Compared to the previous week, the number of Covid-19 deaths has increased by 4.23 percent last week ending on Saturday.

In the same 24-hour period, 1,987 Covid-19 patients recovered from their illnesses raising the total number of recoveries to 4,35,601. This was around 87.20 percent of all confirmed cases.

Of the yesterday's deceased, all of them died in hospitals while 17 of them were males.

Three were aged between 31 and 40, two between 41 and 50, five between 51 and 60 and the rest 15 were above 60 years, according to the press release.