Plans to relax Covid-19 measures in Cyprus have been put on hold as case numbers on the island remain high.
Middle school pupils will have to stay at home for another two weeks as the UK variant has led to a rise in infections.
Health minister Constantinos Ioannou said samples showed that more than a quarter of positive tests are as a result of the faster-spreading variant, according to Associated Press.
He said that infections remain high in families with workers in both the public and private sectors, as well as primary schools. Compulsory testing for a quarter of employees has been introduced.
More than a quarter of COVID-19 cases detected in Cyprus are of a highly contagious variant of the virus first identified in Britain last autumn and may explain a recent spike, authorities on the island said on Thursday.
Cyprus sent a number of positive samples to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) detected in January and February, with 25.7% of them found to be the British variant, the Health Ministry said.
The island first reported cases of the strain, known as B.1.1.7, in early January, after tests on positive samples taken in December 2020.
The strain is between 30% and 100% more deadly than previous dominant variants, researchers reported on Wednesday in the British Medical Journal.
Cyprus’s health ministry said the variant was considered about 50% more contagious than the more common COVID-19 strain. It was also likely to be fuelling a recent surge, with higher transmission among younger people noted over the past 10 days, it said.
Cyprus has been reporting peaks and troughs in the COVID-19 outbreak for the past 12 months. After a relative lull, infections have been climbing for about two weeks.
The island has reported 38,065 cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic started, and 235 deaths.
Main Photo: A woman wearing protective face mask crosses the street on the empty center of Nicosia, Cyprus. EPA-EFE/KATIA CHRISTODOULOU
