There has been a major spike in the number of Covid-19 cases reported, as health authorities said that there were 488 new cases of the virus found on Tuesday.

Furthermore, five people have died while they were positive for the virus.

It is the highest number of cases of the virus reported since 20 April when 542 cases were reported, while the last time more deaths were reported in a single day was when six were reported on 12 February this year.

69 recoveries from the virus were reported, taking the number of active cases up to 3,295.

It’s the first time since 5 May this year that the number of active cases has exceeded the 3,000 mark. Malta had 3,158 active cases back then.

1,788 swab tests were carried out in the last 24 hours, equating to a positivity rate of 27.3%.

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.

Malta has had 98,563 cases of the virus. 94,167 of those have recovered, while 735 have died.