The rate of positivity has seriously increased - yesterday morning we had 621 new cases, all the indicators characteristic of the epidemic have changed, the head of the National Center for Disease Control, Amiran Gamkrelidze, told InterPressNews.

According to Amiran Gamkrelidze, the intensity of virus transmission has seriously increased, the reproduction index is 2.36%, and such indicator has not been observed in the country for a long time.

As for the positivity rate, which represents the percentage of positive results from the conducted tests, according to Amiran Gamkrelidze, the positivity index has approached almost 5%.

"For the last 2 weeks, since the epidemic situation in the country has changed, the number of new cases is increasing daily. As you know, for the last 2 months, the epidemic situation was added up once a week and everything was quiet. We had 30-50 infections per day, and the weekly rate was no more than 100-200 cases.

The positivity rate and reproducibility index were below 1%. For the last two weeks, weekly cases have been doubling. We had 2570 cases on Tuesday as well. On Wednesday morning, we had 621 daily cases, which is serious.

The workload of hospitals is not high, it is 7-8%. However, all indicators characteristic of the epidemic have changed. The rate of positivity approached almost 4-5%. The positivity rate of the last 7 and 14 days has also seriously increased. The reproduction index has seriously increased, it was 2.36% yesterday, it's been a long time since we've had it this high. This is mainly due to the circulation of new substrains BA.4 and BA.5, they have high transmission rates.

Fortunately, this substrain is not more aggressive than its predecessors. The heaviest indicator has not yet increased, however, all this is noteworthy and needs to be treated with caution," Gamkrelidze notes.