Boy, 17, among five COVID-19 deaths; 279 new cases

Guyana’s COVID-19 death toll has increased to 783 with the addition of five new deaths, the Ministry of Health reported on Wednesday.

Those new deaths were all unvaccinated persons who succumbed at varying medical facilities on September 28 and 29, including a 17-year-old boy.

The patients were admitted with COVID-19 like symptoms but died while receiving care. The samples that were taken at the time of their admission subsequently returned positive test results.

Those new deaths are listed below:

With these deaths, 158 deaths have been recorded in September thus.  This is the sixth child to have died from the disease in Guyana. Earlier this month, a five-month-old baby girl with a suspected congenital heart condition was listed as among Guyana’s latest COVID-19 deaths.

Previously, an 11-year-old cancer patient who died at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) on November 6, 2020, was later classified as a COVID-19 death.

On November 29, 2020, a 6-day old baby boy of Region Three died while receiving care at a medical facility. In May, this year, a young 17-year-old boy also succumbed after he was infected with COVID-19.

Additionally, the country recorded another 279 new COVID-19 infections over a 24hr period from 2,090 tests, pushing the total cases recorded since March 2020 to 31,638.

These new cases were recorded in: Region Two (20 new cases), Region Three (52 cases), Region Four (169 cases), Region Five (four cases), Region Six (10 cases), Region Seven (five cases), Region Nine (six cases) and Region 10 (10 cases).

There are also 31 patients receiving critical care in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU), 11 people in institutional quarantine, 136 in institutional isolation and 3, 926 people in home isolation.

Importantly, a total of 26,762 people have recovered after they were infected with COVID-19.