The to­tal num­ber of ac­tive COVID-19 cas­es has once again crossed 2,000 af­ter 217 cas­es were record­ed by the Min­istry of Health yes­ter­day.

This is the largest num­ber of cas­es to be con­firmed by the Min­istry of Health in one day.

The min­istry, how­ev­er, said the new con­fir­ma­tions did not rep­re­sent a 24-hour in­crease as it in­clud­ed the re­sults of sam­ples tak­en as ear­ly as Sep­tem­ber 4.

The num­ber of ac­tive cas­es yes­ter­day stood at 2,005 and the to­tal num­ber of peo­ple to have con­tract­ed the virus lo­cal­ly since the first case was re­port­ed on March 12, at 3,651.

The to­tal num­ber of ac­tive cas­es lo­cal­ly had sig­nif­i­cant­ly dropped on Thurs­day af­ter 655 peo­ple in home iso­la­tion were re­leased by the min­istry and four were dis­charged from hos­pi­tal. This re­duced the then ac­tive cas­es from 2,459 to 1,809.

In light of the shift to home iso­la­tion, a new cat­e­go­ry was added to the min­istry’s up­date called “re­cov­ered com­mu­ni­ty cas­es” which refers to peo­ple “who were pre­vi­ous­ly COVID-19 pos­i­tive and in self-iso­la­tion at home and sub­se­quent­ly met the dis­charge cri­te­ria and were re­leased from self-iso­la­tion.”

Nine pa­tients in home iso­la­tion and eight pa­tients from hos­pi­tal were al­so dis­charged by the min­istry. This means that 1,586 peo­ple have re­cov­ered from the virus lo­cal­ly.

No ad­di­tion­al deaths were record­ed yes­ter­day, with the count stay­ing at 60. In light of this, T&T dropped one rank­ing to be­come the CARI­COM coun­try with the fifth-high­est num­ber of deaths, sur­passed by Guyana which now has 62 deaths.

Haiti re­mains at the top of the rank­ing with 221 deaths, fol­lowed by Suri­name with 95 deaths and the Ba­hamas with 69.

Ac­cord­ing to the lat­est da­ta pro­vid­ed by the min­istry ear­li­er this week, deaths lo­cal­ly have been pre­dom­i­nant­ly male, el­der­ly and in pa­tients with co­mor­bidi­ties.

—Rishard Khan