CASTRIES, St Lucia (CMC) – The chairman of the St Lucia COVID-19 Management Centre, Cletus Springer, Tuesday warned of a fifth wave of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

In his announcement, Springer shared that St Lucians should not be surprised at this news because they had been “forewarned that such a development was inevitable”.

“Fellow St Lucians, it’s my unpleasant duty to tell you that all key indicators point to the start of a 5th wave of COVID-19 in St Lucia,” Springer wrote on his Facebook page, adding that December is one of “heightened social activity and international travel.”

“From our daily updates over the past week, you will have already seen evidence of a dramatic upward trend across all indicators,” he added.

Latest figures released by the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, on Monday, showed that 38 new cases of COVID-19 had been recorded from a total of 345 samples, which were collected on December 25 and 26. These new cases brought the total number of cases diagnosed in the country to date to 13,357 with 204 active cases.

The island has recorded 295 deaths since the first case was registered in March last year.

The ministry said to date, a total of 49,067 individuals have been fully vaccinated. Another 6,529 are partially vaccinated and 3,062 have received their booster shot.

Springer said that the most recent data shows that the rate of transmission has increased from 0.8 to 1.9, meaning that every infected person now infects nearly two people.

He said that the number of active cases is up from a low of under 100 a week ago to 178, adding that “the positivity rate has risen from three to seven per cent.

“The per cent positive is a critical measure because it tells us how widespread infection is in an area where the testing is being done. The average daily infection rate—which tells us how actively the virus is spreading—has almost quadrupled from three per cent to 11.5 per cent. This means that every day, nearly 4 times as many people are getting infected with COVID-19,” said Springer, highlighting that these indicators do not capture the impact of social activities that took place over the past week.

He said those numbers should start to reflect in January’s statistics.

“We should see these impacts by the first week of January, and by mid-January, we can expect to see the impact of New Year’s Day activities. Also important is that we do not yet know whether and/or Omicron is influencing the data and what effect it will have in the future. Based on its ease of spread, we can expect to see a surge in daily infections,” he said.