The present Covid-19 reproduction rate in our community now is down to 0.45 and this is a result of excellent vaccination process and the measures we had in place during the last 40 days, statistician Vincent Marmara said.

Now a quarter of the Maltese population is fully vaccinated while half of the population received the first vaccine dose, Marmara said in his weekly blog for The Malta Independent on Sunday.

Marmara urged everyone to keep following the restrictive measures in place since these are scientifically studied decisions that will continue helping numbers to go down and the community returning back to a normal life.

Last Thursday, the government announced an easing of the restrictions, staggered over a number of weeks, after the number of new cases dropped significantly, going as low as nine, which was the lowest daily count since last July.

Statistics for this week show that the number of new COVID-19 cases kept going down. In fact, only 1.1% of the swab tests done during the past week resulted in new positive cases.

Victim numbers kept reducing as well while the number of recoveries was always larger than that of new cases. Last week the number of recoveries was 54% higher, Marmara said.

This positive drop in new COVID-19 cases is also evident across Europe. All major countries experienced lower number of new cases.

Currently the SEIR model is being used to get these numbers and statisticians are continuously updating so decision makers will have a clearer picture on what measures should be relaxed or not.

Marmara insisted that no one should think that the pandemic is over – it is still very present – and so everyone still needs to keep to the health measures indicated by the Health Authorities so that the situation will be kept under control.