Czech Republic reports 11,928 new COVID-19 cases

On Wednesday, 11,928 new cases of covid-19 were detected in the Czech Republic, which is 2,600 less than on the same day of the previous week. Since mid-February, daily increases on weekdays have not fallen below 10,000. The number of people who have died with a covid in the Czech Republic since the beginning of the epidemic has exceeded 24,000. The reproduction number showing the spread of the epidemic to date has dropped from 0.97 to 0.91.

There were 8,910 patients with covid in hospitals on Wednesday, 1989, of them had a severe course of the disease. The hospitalized number is several hundred lower than the previous two days when it exceeded nine thousand. So far, according to revised data, most people with coronavirus during the epidemic were in hospitals this Monday, when the ministry registered 9,429 hospitalized people, over 2,000 of whom required intensive care. In hospitals, 11 percent of all ICU and ARO units are now vacant, with 124 remaining for covid patients.

The burden on hospitals remains enormous and greater than statistics show. People who are no longer led as positive, but are in serious condition, remain in hospitals. Although daily increases in week-on-week comparisons have been declining in recent days and the reproductive number has remained below one, indicating a slowdown in the epidemic, hospitals remain congested. The government, which will meet tonight, is therefore not planning to loosen the current restrictions significantly and intends to call for an extension of the state of emergency beyond March 28.

Since last March, infection with a new type of coronavirus in the Czech Republic has claimed 24,117 lives. The previous thousand deaths occurred in five days. Recently, about 200 people die from the covid every day. This year’s daily high is 233 deaths on March 8, the second-worst result since the outbreak. More people with covid died only on November 3, 262.

The epidemic has spread the most in recent days in the Jindřichův Hradec and Mladá Boleslav regions, where more than a thousand new cases per 100,000 inhabitants have been added in the last week.

Laboratories conducted more than 155,000 tests for covid-19 on Wednesday, at least this week. In a week-on-week comparison, there were about 27,000 fewer tests. About 80 percent of the assays performed were less sensitive antigenic, the rest more reliable PCR assays. Thirty-six percent of all samples were positive. The so-called seven-day moving average is around 33 percent.