The local COVID-19 death toll has increased to 323 since the Ministry of Health was able to confirm that six more people, who died between April 25, 2021, and May 6, 2021, were COVID-positive.

On Saturday morning, the Health Ministry reported that three additional individuals, who tested positive for the disease COVID-19, died.  Later on Saturday, however, the Ministry noted that there are six additional COVID-19 deaths, which were not reported.

It was explained that the gold standard test for COVID-19, the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test, was conducted on these individuals.

“The patients were admitted with COVID-19 like symptoms but died while receiving care at our medical institutions. Samples were taken at the time of admission which subsequently returned positive tests,” the Health Ministry said in a statement.

The Ministry had to wait on the confirmation that these individuals were indeed infected with the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes the disease, COVID-19 before announcing that these were COVID-19 or COVID-19 related deaths. For clarity, COVID-19 related deaths are those fatalities where an individual who has been infected with COVID-19 died but the individual may have had some other pre-existing condition that caused the death.

The details on the latest fatalities, according to the Health Ministry, are as follows:

With these newly confirmed deaths, it means that the death toll in April, which has been Guyana’s deadliest month in the pandemic thus far, has increased to 66. And, in just eight days, 24 people died in May already.

It is important to note that the first known infection and subsequently, death from the disease, COVID-19 was recorded on March 11, 2020. In about one year – from March 11, 2020, to March 4, 2021 – Guyana recorded exactly 200 deaths.

However, from March 4 to now, Guyana has seen a surge in both the number of additional people infected daily and the number of lives lost due to COVID-19. In just two months since March 4, 123 lives have been lost.