249 new cases of Covid-19 were reported by health authorities on Friday.

552 people have recovered from the virus, and no new deaths were reported in the last 24 hours, meaning that the number of active cases currently stands at 5,567.

2,038 swab tests were carried out in the last 24 hours, equating to a positivity rate of 12.27%.

The Health Ministry has, since the day after the 2022 general election at the end of March, stopped publishing daily bulletins on social media which show details about the pandemic in Malta.

Data is still being published by the Health Ministry’s COVID-19 Public Health Response Team on an open source database on the platform GitHub, although certain details such as the number of positive Covid-19 cases in hospital and the details about people who had died are not included in the dataset.

However, Health Minister Chris Fearne said in a press conference on Friday – where new relaxations to measures were announced – that 88 people were in hospital with Covid-19.

Only 39 of those, however, were actually in hospital as a result of the virus, with the other patients being there as they had gone into hospital for other procedures and tested positive after routine entry swab tests.

Two people, meanwhile, are receiving care in Mater Dei’s Intensive Therapy Unit (ITU), Fearne said.

Malta has had 90,168 cases of the virus.  83,521 of those have recovered, while 684 have died.