Lithuania registered 717 new coronavirus infections and 18 deaths from Covid-19 for the past 24 hours, the country's statistics office said on Tuesday morning.
The coronavirus-related death toll now stands at 2,494, including seven earlier fatalities added to the tally on Tuesday.
Overall, 168,708 people have tested positive for Covid-19 in Lithuania since the start of the pandemic.
As of Tuesday morning, 50,933 people in Lithuania have received their first coronavirus vaccine shots and 2,640 have been given the second jab.
A little over 7,000 people were stested for the coronavirus over the past 24 hours.
The office did not provide the latest statistics on active cases and recoveries in its report.
Jonas Bačelis, an analyst with Statistics Lithuania, told BNS that recovery statistics from the National Public Health Centre (NVSC) recently “started to differ significantly” from the daily count of new infections based on the electronic health services system.
“These are different figures, but if all the indications say that the pandemic is receding, then the daily number of new infections cannot be ten times higher than the daily number of recoveries,” the analyst said.
“Because of these obvious discrepancies, we [...] are moving to calculating recoveries based on E-health data using an algorithm,” he added. “A person will be considered as having ‘statistically recovered’ after a certain number of days since they contracted the virus.”
The statistics office is now waiting for Health Minister Arūnas Dulkys “to officially approve the method” for calculating the number of recoveries and active cases, according to the analyst.
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