ST LUCIA has reported no new COVID-19 cases for 10 consecutive days.

The Caribbean island has a total of 15 confirmed cases among its population of 183,460.

Of the 15 cases, 13 have recovered, including two UK citizens who travelled back to the UK after being discharged from hospital in St Lucia earlier in April. There have been no confirmed COVID-19 deaths.

The country’s last confirmed case was reported on April 10.

“Though we at the ministry of health are heartened by these data trends, we note that this should not provide us with a false sense of security and allow us to believe that we are no longer at risk for the COVID-19 outbreak,” chief medical officer Dr Sharon Belmar-George said in a press briefing yesterday.

The island is on partial shutdown and has implemented a 10-hour curfew between 7pm and 5am. Everyone apart from essential workers are required to remain at home outside of curfew hours unless leaving home for food or medical needs. All mas events and social gatherings have been prohibited.

“We are still at a critical juncture in the implementation of the national COVID-19 response,” Belmar-George said.

St Lucia is one of a number of countries in the Caribbean that have seen no cases of the coronavirus across several consecutive days.

As of yesterday, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados both reported they had no new cases of COVID-19 for five days straight.

Trinidad and Tobago, which has completed 1,380 tests, has seen a total of 26 people recover from the coronavirus and eight die as a result of contracting it.

Barbados has completed 1,063 tests. A total of 23 people confirmed to have COVID-19 have recovered and five have died. There are 47 people still in isolation.

Speaking at a press conference held yesterday, minister of health and wellness Lt Col Jeffrey Bostic, said the lack of new cases in five days in a row was “very encouraging”, minister of health and wellness Lt Col Jeffrey Bostic but that the island was “not out of the woods”.

The implementation of a rigorous contact tracing strategy has been credited as key in Barbados’ fight against the spread of COVID-19.

“Of the 75 confirmed cases, about 31 of those would have resulted from contact tracing, and we would have had just under 400 persons in quarantine and monitored, as a result of contact tracing,” Bostic said.

He added: “We have established a very rigorous contact tracing regime because we recognise that even with a lockdown, and all of the testing and everything that we do, the key is for us to be able to identify those persons who would have come into contact with confirmed cases; locate them wherever they are; quarantine as necessary, and in some cases, as we have had to do, isolate. The faster we get to these contacts, the better this country will be in terms of being able to fight this virus,” the minister of health said.

Elsewhere in the Caribbean, Jamaica reported more than 200 cases of COVID-19 yesterday, taking its total to 223.

As of yesterday, 1,889 tests had been conducted.

In response to the increase in cases and the prospect of community spread, the government announced a new curfew, which will come into effect on April 22.

“We have examined the curfews, and as I’ve said, they have worked very well [in the past], but given the phase we’re in, the potential now of community spread, we believe that we had to tighten the curfews,” Jamaica’s prime minister Andrew Holness said.

For 14 days between the hours of 6pm and 6am, everyone apart from key workers will be required to stay home during these hours. The new island-wide restrictions follow an initial curfew between the hours of 8pm to 6am.