Covid-19 has claimed five more lives, it was revealed last night.

The news brought the death toll from the coronavirus to 87.

But the island’s number of active cases fell sharply, from the 1,106 reported on Monday to 890 – the lowest number of cases since September 9.

The number of people in hospital is 49, ten of them in intensive care.

There are 841 cases being monitored by public health officials.

There were 36 positive results out of 3,299 tests that came back to health officials since the last update.

There have also been 247 recoveries.

The results brought the positivity rate down to 1.1 per cent.

The seven-day average of the island’s real-time reproduction number is 0.62.

Kim Wilson, the health minister, said: “Although our number of active cases is trending in the right direction, we are still experiencing deaths, and that is very sad."

Five of the new cases came in from overseas and the rest were on-island transmissions or are under investigation.

Of the latter, 30 per cent occurred in people who were fully vaccinated, 70 per cent were not vaccinated.

Variant typing remained unavailable because testing has been prioritised.

The latest figures brought the island’s total number of cases since the pandemic hit to 5,455.