Mozambique: Number of new Covid-19 cases declines – Watch

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Mozambique: Number of new Covid-19 cases declines – Watch

9:55 CAT | 20 Apr 2021

Screen grab: MISAU

According to the Mozambican health authorities, the number of new cases of the Covid-19 respiratory disease reported in Mozambique on Monday was just 25, the lowest figure for a single 24 hour period this year.

This is partly due to the relatively small number of tests carried out on Monday. According to the Deputy National Director of Public Health, Benigna Matsinhe, speaking at a Maputo press conference, since the start of the pandemic, 504,532 people have been tested for the Coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 520 of them in the previous 24 hours,

Of the samples tested, 258 were from Maputo city, 157 from Manica, 36 from Sofala, 24 from Cabo Delgado, 16 from Inhambane, 13 from Nampula, three from Zambezia, two from Maputo province, and one from Gaza. No tests were reported from Niassa or Tete.

495 of these tests gave negative results, and 25 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brought the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 69,228. Of the new cases diagnosed on Monday, 22 were from Maputo city and three from Manica. There was not a single positive case from any other province.

Monday’s cases gave a positivity rate (the proportion of those tested found to be infected) of 4.8 per cent. This compares with 6.8 per cent on Sunday, 5.9 per cent on Saturday, 5.9 per cent on Friday and six per cent on Thursday. This is no longer just a blip in the statistics, and it is no exaggeration to say that the positivity rate has fallen to below ten per cent.

Over the same 24 hour period, two further deaths from Covid-19 were reported –a 43 year old Mozambican man in Maputo and a 51 year old Mozambican women in Sofala. This brings the total Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique to 800.

As of Monday, 43 people were under medical care in the Covid-19 wards (unchanged from Sunday’s figure). 32 (74.4 per cent) were in Maputo, three in Nampula, three in Matola, two in Zambezia, two in Inhambane, and one in Sofala. There were no patients in the Covid-19 facilities in Cabo Delgado, Niassa, Manica, Tete or Gaza.

Matsinhe also reported that a further 1,022 people had been declared fully recovered from Covid-19 (967 in Maputo city, 36 in Maputo province, 10 in Zambezia and nine in Gaza). This brings the total number of recoveries to 62,315, or 90 per cent of all those diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.

The number of active Covid-19 cases fell to 6,109 (down from 7,108 on Sunday. The geographical distribution of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 4,205 (68.8 per cent of the total); Maputo province, 748; Nampula, 301; Sofala, 278; Niassa, 178; Zambezia, 147; Inhambane, 128; Cabo Delgado, 60; Gaza, 38; Tete, 17; Manica, nine.

Sergio Chicumbe, director of surveys for the National Health Institute (INS), told the press conference that none of the recently announced coronavirus variants have been identified in Mozambique.

The INS, he said, was maintaining “genome surveillance” of the variants of the virus detected in the country, in collaboration with a regional reference laboratory in South Africa

“We haven’t yet detected other variants”, said Chicumbe – only the original coronavirus and the South African variant were known to be in circulation in Mozambique. “We have not detected the Indian, the Brazilian or the United Kingdom variants”.

Chicumbe said he had not mentioned other variants “because they have no epidemiological relevance, that is, in terms of the capacity of the virus to cause a more severe infection, to become more transmissible, or to affect diagnostic capacity or the effectiveness of the vaccine”.

Source: AIM / MISAU