SANTIAGO, May 3 (Xinhua) -- New cases of COVID-19 in Chile decreased by 14 percent in the past 14 days and 9 percent in the last seven days, Chile's Health Minister Enrique Paris said on Monday.
April 5-11 was "a critical week," with an average of 8,000 new cases a day, forcing the government to postpone landmark elections for a constituent assembly, Paris said.
The elections were rescheduled for May 15-16, when "between 3,500 and 4,500 daily cases" of COVID-19 are expected, Paris said at a press conference.
"We will have much lower figures than those we saw and suffered in the first week of April," he said.
The country reported 4,874 new cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, raising the accumulated caseload to 1,215,815.
In the same period, 98 more people died of the disease, bringing the pandemic death toll to 26,659. Enditem
