Mozambique: First doses of Covid-19 vaccines to arrive by end of month – AIM report

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Mozambique: First doses of Covid-19 vaccines to arrive by end of month – AIM report

11:42 CAT | 23 Feb 2021

Screen grab: MISAU

The first doses of a vaccine against the Covid-19 respiratory disease will arrive in Mozambique by the end of February, according to the Deputy National Director of Public Health, Benigna Matsinhe.

Speaking at a Maputo press conference on Monday, Matsinhe said the first batch of vaccines are intended for front line health workers.

These vaccines come from China, she said, but did not reveal how many doses will arrive this month. “It won’t be a large number”, she warned.

“The process of acquiring vaccines is still under way”, said Matsinhe. “This is not something that just takes a week. These are lengthy procedures. There’s a long queue of countries looking for the same vaccines”.

“The demand is great and the supply is limited”, she continued, “When we started the process, the mechanism that was most trustworthy, COVAX (run by the World Health Organisation WHO), guaranteed that its vaccines would arrive this month, February. But then the date was changed to May. We shall continue monitoring until the vaccine arrives through COVAX”.

But the Chinese vaccine, which has nothing to do with COVAX, will arrive in the near future “for the health workers, who are the priority group right now”.

The vaccines, Matsinhe said, will be administered gradually as they become available, for those defined as priorities, until the entire eligible population is covered. “In May, we will probably have more vaccines, and we will continue the acquisition until we have completed the entire process”.

Giving the latest daily update from the Health Ministry on the state of the epidemic in Mozambique, Matsinhe said that, in the previous 24 hours, a further four Covid-19 deaths have been reported, three men and one woman, aged between 48 and 84. All the deaths occurred in Maputo city. One of the victims was a foreigner, but Matsinhe did not give his nationality.

The Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique now stands at 599. The great majority of these deaths – 473 (just under 80 per cent) – have occurred in Maputo.

Since the start of the pandemic, 406,550 people have been tested for the coronavírus that causes Covid-19, 2,337 of them in the previous 24 hours. Of the samples tested, 793 were from Maputo city, 455 from Maputo province, 308 from Inhambane, 300 from Zambezia, 179 from Nampula, 125 from Gaza, 102 from Niassa, 54 from Sofala, 11 from Tete and 10 from Manica. No tests were reported from Cabo Delgado.

1,820 of the tests gave negative results, and 517 tested positive for the coronavirus. The positivity rate on Monday (the proportion of those tested found to be carrying the virus) was 22.1 per cent – which is similar to the rates found over the past few days (23.7 per cent on Sunday, 27.6 per cent on Saturday, 23.9 per cent on Friday and 24.2 per cent on Thursday.

515 of Monday’s positive cases are Mozambicans. One is a foreigner (but Matsinhe did not reveal his nationality), and the nationality of one person has not yet been confirmed. 262 are women or girls, and 255 are men or boys. 42 are children under the age of 15, and 28 are over 65 years old. For 16 cases, no age information was available.

One again the majority of the new cases came from the far south – 196 from Maputo city and 75 from Maputo province. Between them, Maputo city and province provided 52.4 per cent of the new cases reported on Monday. But there were also 82 cases from Zambezia, 54 from Inhambane, 41 from Sofala, 37 from Nampula, 14 from Niassa, 14 from Gaza, three from Tete and one from Manica.

Matsinhe reported that, over the same 24 hour period, 22 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (21 in Maputo and one in Cabo Delgado), while 24 new patients were admitted (17 in Maputo, three in Sofala, three in Cabo Delgado and one in Tete).

As of Monday, there were 222 people under medical care in the Covid-19 wards (down from 233 on Sunday). The great majority of these patients – 170 (76.6 per cent) are in Maputo. 163 are men and 59 are women. 96 of the hospitalised cases (43.3 per cent) are over 60 years old, and 63 (28.4 per cent) are aged between 45 and 59.

Matsinhe described the clinical condition of 113 of the patients as “moderate”, but 99 are seriously ill and ten are in a critical state. 174 are undergoing oxygen therapy, and 13 are on ventilators in intensive care.

Matsinhe also reported that 957 people on Monday were declared fully recovered from Covid-19 (390 from Maputo province, 183 from Tete, 168 from Sofala, 161 from Inhambane, and 55 from Zambezia). This brings the total number of recoveries to 36,224, which is 64.5 per cent of all those diagnosed with the coronavírus in Mozambique.

Since on Monday the number of recoveries was considerably larger than the number of new cases, the number of active Covid-19 case in Mozambique fell to 19,333 (from 19,777 on Sunday). The distribution of these cases is a follows: Maputo city, 11,496 (59.5 per cent of the total); Maputo province, 2,243; Sofala, 2,022; Cabo Delgado, 850; Gaza, 719; Inhambane, 675; Niassa, 438; Nampula, 293; Manica, 219; Zambezia, 198; and Tete, 180.

Asked if the slight reduction in new cases and deaths in recent days meant that the epidemic is stabilising in Mozambique, Matsinhe warned against excessive optimism.

“Although we are seeing an apparent stabilization, it is not yet measurable”, she said. “We must not relax the preventive measures against Covid-19”.

Matsinhe pointed out that, in the first 22 days of February, more people have died of Covid-19 than in all of January.

Source: AIM