In Lebanon, coronavirus (COVID-19) cases have been increasing rapidly over the past few weeks, almost completely filling its hospitals’ available beds. On Friday, the country surpassed 50,000 confirmed cases.
In its daily COVID-19 report, the Lebanese Health Ministry announced that 1,426 cases had been recorded between Thursday and Friday.
With that, the total number of confirmed cases to date reached 51,170, out of which 28,313 are active cases.
On the same day, 11 new fatalities related to the virus were recorded. In total 450 people have passed away in Lebanon from COVID-19 since the outbreak began.
According to the Health Ministry’s data, the majority of the recorded cases (27%) are aged between 20 and 29, followed by patients aged between 30 and 39 (18%).
Demographically, the governorate that has the highest number of cases is Mount Lebanon (38.6%), with its capital Baabda having recorded 5,794 cases to date.*
In response to the recent spike in daily case numbers, caretaker Health Minister Hamad Hasan said, earlier this week, that the number of available hospital beds to treat COVID-19 cases in 7 governmental hospitals would increase within a week.
This was after he warned that only a few ICU beds were still unoccupied and that hospitals were running out of space to take in and treat severely ill COVID-19 patients.
Meanwhile, 111 villages in the country have been under lockdown since past Sunday after having registered dangerously high case numbers in proportion to their respective populations.
However, caretaker Minister Hasan recently indicated that errors may have been made in the decision to close a number of towns.
*19.1% of Lebanon’s COVID-19 cases are categorized as “unspecified” by the Health Ministry. This might affect the accuracy of the presented demographic data.
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