Lithuania has registered 263 new coronavirus infections and six deaths from Covid-19 over the past 24 hours, the country's statistics office said on Monday morning.
“It seems that we are entering a third pandemic wave,” the office also said in a statement, noting the daily numbers of new infections were not going down anymore and the share of positive tests has been growing for a week.
Lithuania's 14-day coronavirus infection rate currently stands at 242.9 per 100,000 people.
Overall, 194,333 people have tested positive for the coronavirus in Lithuania since the start of the pandemic.
Currently 179,624 people are considered as having statistically recovered from Covid-19, and 8,122 as statistically ill, meaning that they have tested positive for the virus in the past 28 days, compared to the declared numbers of 131,245 and 56,501.
Statistics Lithuania releases data based on a new methodology that separates data on active coronavirus cases into declared and statistical ones. A declared patient is a person who has been diagnosed with the disease, but their recovery has not been confirmed by their general practitioner.
A statistical patient is a person who has been diagnosed with the disease in the last 28 days.
The statistical incidence rate may more accurately reflect the real situation, it notes.
A total of 3,178 people have died from Covid-19 in Lithuania so far. The overall number of deaths directly or indirectly related to the coronavirus has reached 6,180.
People were not vaccinated on Sunday.
A total of 121,150 people have received their first coronavirus vaccine shots so far and 67,014 have been given the second jab.
A total of 2,044,653 molecular (PCR) tests for Covid-19 have been carried out in the country so far, including 2,952 in the past 24 hours.
Fifty-eight antigen tests have been performed in the last 24 hours, too, bringing the total number to 29,588.
The share of positive tests over the past seven days now stands at 7.8 percent.
Third wave
Lithuania's statistics office, Statistics Lithuania, says the country may be entering the third wave of the pandemic.
The number of new daily cases is no longer going down and the percentage of positive tests is growing, it said.
“Lithuania's trajectory in terms of the two pandemic indicators has reversed to the path that was recorded in October,” the service said on Monday.
“This tendency has been observed for a whole week and now raises no doubt,” the statement reads.
The National Public Health Centre (NVSC), however, later rejected the suggestion that the country is entering the third wave of the pandemic. According to the centre, fluctuations in some indicators are still part of the second wave.
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