Izah Azahari & James Kon
The reduction in new COVID-19 cases in the past few days is possibly due to the infection in Brunei Darussalam reaching its peak.
This was said by Minister of Health Dato Seri Setia Dr Haji Mohd Isham bin Haji Jaafar at the press conference yesterday.
The minister added that he hopes to see the case numbers continue to decline in the next two weeks.
“We will see in the next few days if the trend continues. The R-Naught value has also decreased from two to 1.09,” said Dato Seri Setia Dr Haji Mohd Isham.
The minister said eight COVID-19 patients have died in the past 48 hours where three were COVID-related and five were not attributed to the virus. The Sultanate saw 3,155 new infections yesterday bringing the national tally of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 100,173.
Of the new cases, 2,519 were detected by antigen rapid test (ART) and reported on BruHealth app while 636 were from 4,756 RT-PCR tests performed in the past 24 hours.
Some 4,106 cases have recovered yesterday bringing the number of recoveries to 60,748 and active cases to 39,270.
The bed occupancy rate at isolation centres is 9.2 per cent with 309 patients while 38,961 are undergoing home self-isolation.
Eleven cases are in Category 4 requiring oxygen assistance and under close monitoring and seven patients are in Category 5 needing artificial ventilation and receiving treatment at the intensive care unit.
As of March 8, over 94 per cent of Brunei population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and 57.3 per cent were administered booster shots.
