North Macedonia has registered 116 cases of COVID-19 reinfections, including those in Tuesday’s report, of which two patients have died, Commission for Infectious Diseases president Zharko Karadzhovski told Wednesday’s press conference.
According to him, this is mainly due to non-compliance with the measures in place, especially by the people who have already been infected with the virus and believe reinfection is unlikely.
“We’re closely monitoring the percentage of occurrence of COVID-19 reinfections. Seeing 116 cases of reinfections out of around 112,000 confirmed cases, is 0.01 percent – which is a relatively small number of the total number of confirmed cases,” Karadzhovski told reporters.
He added that this was not a matter of invalid COVID-19 tests, as 20 institutions in the country have been approved by the Ministry of Health to deal with diagnostics and perform PCR tests.
“I believe the results that we’ve registered as reinfections are largely due to non-compliance with the measures in place, or ultimately to people who thought they were unlikely to get reinfected, but had contact with someone who might have been infected with the UK variant,” said Karadzhovski.
He mentioned that the UK variant typically spreads 50 to 70 percent faster, and it has already been confirmed in the country, particularly in larger cities including Skopje, Ohrid and Prilep.
In addition, Karadzhovski noted that there are around 4,000 variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.
