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By Sami Zaptia.
London, 14 October 2020:
Libya’s National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) reported 836 new Coronavirus cases today, with 294 recoveries and 13 deaths.
This takes the country’s total to 45,821 cases, with 19,851 active cases, 25,301 recoveries and 669 deaths.
During a press conference held in Tripoli yesterday by the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee to Combat the Coronavirus Pandemic, Dr. Khalifa Al-Bakoush, gave an overview of the Coronavirus situation in the country.
Al-Bakoush said that recent societal activities and the opening of wedding and funeral halls despite the prohibition made his committee, meant that instead of descending to the third degree in the rate of the spread of the epidemic, Libya went up to the fourth degree by two degrees.
He said that the return to work in the public sector had reached 81 percent, and transportation cars, restaurants and cafes did not comply with the prescriptions, such as food and beverage delivery and the closing of food halls, which also contributed to the increase in Covid-19 cases.
Al-Bakoush said that there is some laxity by education officials in the Ministry of Education, especially with the start of the exams, and we have noticed a lack of discipline with the precautionary controls in some mosques, coinciding with the permission to reopen mosques, and we do not want to have to go back to the square one.
He said that Libya can live with this virus if the public adhere to the precautionary controls. He warned that if the authorities do not succeed in controlling, tightening the security authorities, and coexisting with the virus, with precautionary controls, the committee will be forced to advise a total lockdown.
Al-Bakoush revealed that PCR tests have reached 4,500, and he looked forward to increasing this number despite the high costs of PCR analysis, as one analysis costs at least US$ 200.
As for reducing the number of deaths, he said this is achieved by increasing the places of filtration, isolation and care, and we have reached a large number filtration points and we have reached about 1,400 beds throughout the country.
Ultimately, he said Libya had reached a situation where it either lives with this disease or not live and we would then be in a critical epidemic situation.
