Mozambique: More details on Covid-19 cases reported on Tuesday – AIM report

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Mozambique: More details on Covid-19 cases reported on Tuesday – AIM report

4:52 CAT | 10 Jun 2020

Photo: INS

Mozambique’s National Director of Public Health, Rosa Marlene, announced on Tuesday that a further 20 cases of the Covid-19 respiratory disease have been diagnosed, bringing the total number of known Covid-19 cases in the country to 453.

Speaking in Maputo at the Health Ministry’s daily press conference on the Covid-19 situation, Marlene said that, since the start of the crisis, 15,190 people have been tested in Mozambique for the coronavirus that causes the disease, 610 of them in the previous 24 hours.

Of the samples tested, 216 were from Maputo city, 177 from Maputo province, 184 from Nampula, 18 from Niassa, 12 from Sofala, two from Cabo Delgado and one from Gaza. 590 of these cases were negative, and 20 tested positive for Covid-19.

All 20 cases are Mozambican citizens, and 18 of them (90 per cent) are male. Half the new cases are from Nampula (eight men and two women). Seven are from Maputo province and three from Maputo city (all men). Following standard Health Ministry procedures all are now under home isolation, and health staff are tracing their contacts.

Marlene said that currently six Covid-19 patients are hospitalised, all of them in Nampula. All are described as in a stable condition. A woman who had been hospitalised in Inhambane, has been discharged and is now regarded as fully recovered.

Five other Covid-19 patients, four Mozambicans and one of Indian nationality, were classed as fully recovered during the previous 24 hours, said Marlene. This brings the number of people who have recovered from the disease to 136.

The distribution of the 453 positive cases by province is as follows: Cabo Delgado, 164; Nampula, 136; Maputo City, 71; Maputo Province, 47; Sofala, 13; Niassa, 5; Tete, 5; Inhambane, 4; Manica, 3; Gaza, 3; Zambezia, 2.

As of Tuesday, Mozambique’s basic Covid-19 statistics were: 453 confirmed cases, of whom 136 have made a full recovery, and 314 are considered as active cases. Three Covid-19 patients have died, two of the disease, and the third from an unrelated cause.

Asked when Mozambican schools might re-open, Marlene said this decision lies in the hands of President Filipe Nyusi, who will be advised by the Technical and Scientific Committee set up to make recommendations on how to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic.

As for the claim made by one World Health Organisation (WHO) official, Maria van Kerkhove, that transmission of Covid-19 by asymptomatic people is “very rare”, the Director of Surveys of the National Health Institute, Sergio Chicumbe, politely dismissed it.

He pointed out that the reference to symptoms is often subjective – while the temperature of a patient can be readily measured, this was not the case with other Covid-19 symptoms, for which doctors depended on descriptions given by the patients themselves. “If a patient says, ‘I have a normal headache’ what does he mean?”, asked Chicumbe.

The key condition for transmission of the disease “is the presence of the virus”, he stressed. This meant that all those diagnosed with the coronavirus, regardless of whether they show symptoms, should go into home isolation.

Van Kerkhove’s remarks have been a gift to all those right-wing forces across the planet who deny the seriousness of the coronavirus, and want to end such practices as social distancing and the obligatory wearing of masks.

WHO engaged in damage limitation later on Tuesday, convening a special press conference, at which officials said much still remains unknown about the virus. Kerkhove herself disowned her previous remarks and admitted “We do know that some people who are asymptomatic, or some people who do not have symptoms, can transmit the virus.”

Source: AIM