Beira Central Hospital: Ophthalmology block to be transformed into Covid-19 isolation ward – AIM report

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Beira Central Hospital: Ophthalmology block to be transformed into Covid-19 isolation ward – AIM report

11:55 CAT | 21 Feb 2021

Photo: Notícias

The Mozambican Ministry of Health is preparing to transform the ophthalmology block in Beira Central Hospital into an additional isolation ward for Covid-19 patients.

According to Health Minister Armindo Tiago, cited by the independent television station STV, this block will be used if the 24th July Hospital, currently Beira’s main Covid-19 treatment centre, runs out of beds.

“We are preparing the ophthalmology block, so that, if we do exhaust the capacity of the 24th July hospital, we will have an area of expansion”, said Tiago.

The government hopes, however, that the current measures to block the spread of Covid-19 will prove effective and it will not be necessary to put patients in the Beira ophthalmology block.

But Tiago admitted that this optimism may prove misplaced. He told reporters that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is continuing to spread throughout the country. In Beira, the positivity rate (the proportion of people tested who turn out to be carrying the virus) “is extremely high”, the Minister said. “Last week it was over 40 per cent. That is, of the people we tested, 40 per cent had a positive result”.

This was considerably higher than the average positivity rate across Mozambique, which was about 30 per cent.

Sofala province, of which Beira is the capital, had, by Friday, 2,296 active Covid-19 cases, which makes it the third most affected province after Maputo city (10,964 cases) and Maputo province (2,344).

Source: AIM