Recent confirmed Covid-19 cases in Limassol do not constitute a second wave of the corona virus, Petros Karayiannis, member of the scientific advisory team on Covid-19 and professor of microbiology and molecular virology at the University of Nicosia’s Medical School told CNA on Tuesday.
“This is not a second wave, it is an outbreak observed in a specific city of Cyprus”, he said, adding that this is an example of what could happen when things go awry.
People, he added, must learn to live with the virus and expressed hope that the detection of new confirmed cases was done on time and in an effective manner so that the chains of transmission and the spreading of the virus in other areas of Cyprus are stopped.
Professor Karayiannis said that there was concern regarding the situation in Limassol in the first days but pointed out that yesterday there were less than ten confirmed cases.
Invited to comment on a statement made by Dr. Leondios Kostrikis, Professor of Molecular Biology at the Department of Biological Sciences of the University of Cyprus and member of the Ministry of Health’s scientific team, that there must be 1,000-1500 active cases in Limassol, he said he disagreed with that estimation.
He said that nine out of ten cases were contacts of known confirmed cases and not random samples, people who had to be self-isolating and despite that they went for testing and this gave a wrong picture of what is happening in the community, “I consider that number to be between 50 and 100,” he added.
He stressed that the clusters of infections will stop when all possible contacts of the positive cases are traced, and remain in isolation.
Replying to another question, he said that the measures taken by the government are satisfactory.
Asked if the decision to move Greece to the list of category B countries was the right one, he pointed out that in the last days there was an increase of confirmed cases from people coming from Greece, while the country`s epidemiological indicators , such as hospital admissions, are worsening and in recent days there were also deaths.
Therefore, he added, the epidemiological team had to decide whether the country should remain in category A or be moved to category B. In the coming days we will know if it was a good decision or not, he concluded.
