Forty-seven new coronavirus infections were confirmed in Lithuania over Thursday, the Ministry of Health said. In all, the country has 696 Covid-19 cases.
Daiva Razmuvienė, an epidemiologist at the National Public Health Centre, told LRT RADIO that the average age of the patients was going up. Until March 21, most of the people diagnosed with the coronavirus in Lithuania had been under 40, she said, but now a fifth of them are people over 60.
Nine people have died of the disease so far in the country, six of them in the town of Ukmergė. Seven patients have been confirmed to have recovered.
Most of the new cases were diagnosed in Klaipėda, a port city in western Lithuania, said Giedrius Surplys, the spokesman for the government's epidemic taskforce, on Friday.
Moreover, 276 hospital workers have been quarantined after being in contact with infected people, Surplys said.
More testing than in Italy
Lithuania has significantly stepped up testing for the coronavirus, according to Surplys.
Lithuania tested 2,809 people for Covid-19 over Thursday and 18,432 since the beginning of the epidemic.
“If you compare how many people we test per population daily, we are ahead of Italy, the United States and South Korea,” Surplys said on Friday morning.
Health minister: Lithuania's rate of confirmed coronavirus cases falling
The rate of positive coronavirus tests in Lithuania is falling, Health Minister Aurelijus Veryga said on Friday.
"The dynamics are positive, which means that the rate of confirmed cases is declining, and although in absolute terms, the number of infected people is growing as the number of tests is increasing, the percentage of confirmed cases out of 100 samples tested is declining," he told reporters.
The minister said 1.6 out of 100 tests had come back positive in the past 24 hours.
A total of 124 patients are currently treated in hospitals, some of them in intensive care units, according to Veryga.
"In intensive care, there are 10 patients with oxygen [masks] and five with artificial lung ventilation. In non-intensive care, there are 32 cases with oxygen masks and 39 without oxygen masks," he said.
Lithuania's coronavirus case count reached 696 on Friday. Nine deaths from the Covid-19 virus and seven recoveries have been confirmed in the country so far.
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