Guernsey continues to see rise in positive Covid cases

After four unknown community cases were identified on Friday, 45 cases were picked up over the weekend.

While one of these was from a traveller, four more did not have a clear source and 40 were identified through contact tracing.

A further 10 were found on Monday, three with an unknown community source and seven through contacts.

Director of Public Health Dr Nicola Brink explained that these ‘unknown source’ cases may actually have a link to the original cases but the data is not yet complete on that.

644 tests were carried out on Sunday 24 January, 293 for symptomatic people, 296 for contacts of a positive case and 55 were labelled ‘other’.

On Monday, 677 people went through the testing tent, 261 symptomatic people, 319 contacts of cases and 97 ‘others’.

‘There are more symptomatic people getting tested through their GPs so that does not represent all of the cases that are being tested,’ she said.

Talking about vaccination numbers, Dr Brink said she was ‘so proud’ of the vaccination team, which achieved zero wastage on Monday.

‘If they know that someone is ill or has had to cancel they have a list of people that they will go and phone to say there is a spare dose and can they come in.’

The vaccination centre opened earlier than planned as the smaller vaccination centre at the PEH was not set up to allow for social distancing measures and they did not want to get behind schedule on the vaccine roll-out.

Over the weekend, 383 people received a dose of the vaccine and on the first day of the community vaccination programme, 365 people received their dose.

352 of which were in the age-75-and-over category and 13 were frontline health and social care workers.