The COVID-19 num­bers are be­gin­ning to dip, but the coun­try is still in a "del­i­cate equi­lib­ri­um".

Epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds on Sat­ur­day chart­ed the fig­ures that showed the in­fec­tion rate is start­ing to slow.

The "equi­lib­ri­um" he re­ferred to was the bal­anced re­la­tion­ship be­tween move­ment and cas­es.

"Where we have been see­ing a steady de­cline week-on-week, we are see­ing a plateau where last week and this week we have the same ap­prox­i­mate per­cent­age pos­i­tiv­i­ty. It is some­thing that we are look­ing out for," he said.

"With the pre­lim­i­nary da­ta com­ing in from the lab to­day, we should have ap­prox­i­mate­ly a 25 per cent de­crease com­par­ing the to­tal this week with the week be­fore," he said.

Hinds said that he was "hope­ful" as the num­bers seem to be go­ing in the right di­rec­tion.

Hinds said that when the da­ta was tab­u­lat­ed for the month, it showed that June fig­ures were low­er than May num­bers.

In May, the coun­try record­ed the high­est num­ber of cas­es—13,085, while June fig­ures stood at just over 7,000.

Hos­pi­tal oc­cu­pan­cy rate falling

Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer (Ag) Pri­ma­ry Health Care and Pub­lic Health Spe­cial­ist Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards al­so came with some good news; the hos­pi­tal oc­cu­pan­cy rates were drop­ping.

"A pos­i­tive sign here is that the rolling av­er­age gen­er­al­ly has con­tin­ued to de­crease by and large," she said.

Ab­dool-Richards said that over the last week, the gap be­tween ad­mis­sions and dis­charges nar­rowed sig­nif­i­cant­ly.

"This has been the nar­row­est gap since May 1 or so and that is a pos­i­tive in­di­ca­tor," she said.

Ab­dool-Richards said that a nar­row­ing of the gap meant that few­er pa­tients were pre­sent­ing with COVID-19 than in pre­vi­ous weeks.

There was al­so a de­crease in the num­ber of peo­ple be­ing ad­mit­ted to the hos­pi­tal.

While the vac­cine roll­out is con­tin­u­ing, Dr Michelle Trot­man warned peo­ple to not get com­pla­cent even af­ter re­ceiv­ing their vac­ci­na­tions. Trot­man said that there were a "hand­ful" of peo­ple who test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 af­ter the first jab and had to be hos­pi­talised.