A 55-year-old unvaccinated man suffering from a raft of underlying diseases died of the novel coronavirus disease on Tuesday, which came after no COVID-19 fatalities had been recorded in Macau for 116 consecutive days.
The fatality recorded on Tuesday, which raised Macau’s official COVID-19 death toll to 122, was announced in a statement by the Novel Coronavirus Response and Coordination Centre yesterday.
Yesterday’s statement also announced that Macau recorded 520 COVID-19 infections on Tuesday, 331 down from the 851 infections reported on Monday.
According to yesterday’s statement, three of the 520 COVID-19 carriers were admitted to the public Conde de São Januário Hospital Centre for treatment.
According to previous announcements by the centre, two of the 851 COVID-19 carriers reported on Monday were admitted to the public hospital.
Consequently, a total of 118 new COVID-19 patients were admitted to treatment facilities between May 1 and May 30.
In April, there were only two days when Macau had new COVID-19 patients admitted to treatment facilities – two on April 25 and three on April 27.
The Macau government has warned that the city is currently being affected by a new peak of COVID-19 infections, which started early last month.
Before the new fatality, i.e., Macau’s 122nd official COVID-19 death, was recorded on Tuesday, the city had not recorded any COVID-19 fatalities for 116 days in a row, from February 3 to May 29.
Meanwhile, attending a current affairs phone-in programme hosted by Ou Mun Tin Toi, the Chinese-language radio channel of public broadcaster TDM, Leong Iek Hou, who heads the Communicable Disease Prevention and Control Division of the Health Bureau (SSM), noted yesterday that the number of COVID-19 infections began to rise again in April, when the level of immunity against COVID-19 in the population in general started to wane, a few months after Macau suffered its first peak of widespread COVID-19 infections in December and January.
The local government abandoned its long-running dynamic zero-COVID approach in early December last year.
Dr Leong also said that over 90 percent of the COVID-19 infections detected in Macau over recent weeks have been confirmed as Omicron XBB subvariants.
Dr Leong also underlined that the local government has now been tackling COVID-19 as an endemic disease, like various other respiratory infectious diseases.
