Large No. of new COVID-19 cases still being reported

New cases of coronavirus are still being reported in large numbers across the country, said the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) in a joint press release on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the number of people getting tested continues to be considerably lower than last autumn.

The Christmas and New Year period, however, did not cause any significant rise in the number of coronavirus infections.

Measures are taken to stop the spread of the variants to Finland by increasing testing at the borders and by issuing regional restrictions and recommendations.

It is more important than ever to detect all infections quickly, trace them and break the chains of transmission to stop the more transmissible variants of the virus from spreading.

So far, a total of 86 cases of the new variants discovered in the Great Britain and South Africa have been confirmed in Finland.

The majority of the new cases are still of domestic origin, but the proportion of infections originating abroad has risen in recent weeks.

The total number of new cases in the past two-week period (4-17 January) was 3,514, which is 112 cases more than that in the preceding two-week period. The incidence of new cases was 63 per 100,000 inhabitants, while in the preceding two-week period it was 61.

It became evident at the end of last year that people did not get tested to the same extent as before. On 11–17 January, less than 65,000 tests were carried out in the country, whereas on 23 November–6 December, the weekly number was over 130,000.