James Kon
Brunei Darussalam yesterday registered 1,926 new COVID-19 cases, said Minister of Health Dato Seri Setia Dr Haji Mohd Isham bin Haji Jaafar in a press conference.
The minister said of the new cases, “1,230 were from ART test results uploaded to the Ministry of Health’s (MoH) web portal and 696 were from 3,366 RT-PCR laboratory tests performed in the past 24 hours”.
The new cases raised the total confirmed COVID-19 infections in the country to 32,513.
Meanwhile, the minister said the one case that passed away on Friday, who had received two doses of the vaccine, had health problems, thus the death was not due to COVID-19.
Two COVID-19 cases are in Category 4, requiring oxygen assistance and under close monitoring, while another two cases that were previously in Category 4 are recovering and are currently in Category 2A and 3.
Two cases are in Category 5, requiring the assistance of a breathing machine and being treated in the intensive care unit.
The minister said 294 cases recovered yesterday, bringing the number of recoveries in Brunei Darussalam to 19,042 and active cases to 13,362.
The bed occupancy rate in isolation centres nationwide is 9.1 per cent where 216 active cases are placed in isolation centres.
A total of 13,047 cases are undergoing home isolation. Meanwhile, there are 125 active clusters under MoH monitoring of which no clusters involving businesses or public places have been detected.
The minister said as of Friday, 50 per cent of the population had received three doses of the COVID-19 vaccine under the National COVID-19 Vaccination Programme while 94 per cent had received at least two doses.
Dato Seri Setia Dr Haji Mohd Isham reminded the public to report in the BruHealth app if they were in close contact with a positive case within the last two days as well as perform an antigen rapid test (ART) for COVID-19 and report the results to the MoH Portal at www.moh.gov.bn/ARTReport.
The public is advised against waiting for the MoH to reach out to them as there are possibilities of delays. The minister said failure to report a positive ART test result to the portal is an offence under the Infectious Diseases Act.
No violations of the stay-at-home directive were detected yesterday.
Permanent Secretary at the MoH Haji Maswadi bin Haji Mohsin was in attendance.
