THE Ministry of Health confirmed 20 additional COVID-19 deaths on the weekend, bringing the total to 557 to date.

The spike in deaths comes as COVID-19 hospitalisations declined and as the Bahamas reached a new vaccination milestone, with 104,380 people now fully vaccinated, according to the Ministry of Health.

Yesterday, infectious disease expert Dr Nikkiah Forbes cautioned that despite declining numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and the positive vaccination trend, it is too early to say the country is nearing the end of the third wave.

Sixty-seven new COVID-19 cases were recorded on Friday and 46 were recorded on Saturday, pushing the confirmed coronavirus case count to 21,312.

“In the last few weeks the number of cases reported is declining,” Dr Forbes said yesterday. “However, what I will tell you is that the testing has declined. When we look at the health data we look at several indicators. Test taking behaviours affect a number of positive cases and there are biases and things that will affect test taking. A holiday weekend would. If there is very big activity, test taking behaviour may change. In those weeks where the numbers were declining, testing went down. So that’s why it’s important to look at other variables, deaths, hospitalisations and the percent testing positive for the virus.

“The percent testing positive is still on an upward trend and still much higher than where we need it to be. We want it to be under five percent. When you have a high test positivity of upward of 20 percent that is informative and means there is still a lot of COVID-19 out there. “What is positive is when hospitalisation starts to go down, when that trend continues to bear out, that’s an indicator that things are improving.

“We have to keep an eye on the epidemic curve. At the very end of last week there was a very small increase; it’s still too early to say the wave is being flattened or is behind us,” she said.

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