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File photo: Lusa
Mozambique’s National Institute of Health (INS) said on Friday that the Omicron variant of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is behind the exponential rise in the number of infections in the country, warning of “very high” levels of transmissibility, although without a corresponding increase in deaths.
“The Omicron variant is a clear determinant of this exponential increase in the number of cases in recent times,” said Sérgio Chicumbe, the INS director for surveys and health observation in an interview with Lusa. “Of the samples elected for testing, the Omicron variant completely dominates the data and practically the December graph corresponds entirely to this variant.”
Mozambique has been seeing a significant increase in new infections, with the number of active cases rising to 36,733 by Wednesday from 17,623 last week, although the number of deaths associated with Covid-19 is not rising in step, according to the latest update from the Ministry of Health.
According to the INS, the increase in the number of new daily infections is a result of the spread of the Omicron variant, which was initially detected in samples taken in November 2021 in Maputo and quickly became the dominant variant.
“We are on a daily average doing about eight thousand tests and we are detecting thousands of infected individuals,” said Chicumbe. “This represents an exponential increase, which is characteristic of a wave with a very high number of detected cases.”
Despite the increase in the number of infections, the incidence of serious cases resulting in hospitalisations or deaths is extremely low, which Chicumbe said means that “social life” can continue, although with reinforced preventive care.
“The pathogenicity of the virus for hospitalisation and death is relatively low and, therefore, I think it is a comfortable situation to keep social and economic life going, while insisting on the issues of observance of preventive measures and, on the other hand, intensifying the screening of cases,” he said.
The conclusions that the Omicron variant is dominant in several provinces in Mozambique are the result of qualitative genotyping analyses being carried out by the INS, through the National Network for Genomic Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2, but the specific number or percentage of people infected by this variant will only be known after the quantitative analyses.
According to Chicumbe, what is important now is to make people aware that the technologies that have been adopted to stop the disease since its outbreak are still useful, although they should always be updated in view of the emergence of new variants.
“Existing technologies are still valid for all variants, but it is clear that we need to make a new generation of technologies, whether vaccines or testing, to get ahead of the eventual emergence of a variant that may escape testing or vaccine-induced immunity,” he concluded.
Since the announcement of the first case in March 2020, Mozambique has had a cumulative 2,050 deaths and 199,940 confirmed cases.
Worldwide, Covid-19 has caused 5,456,207 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to the latest tally by Agence France-Presse.
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in several countries.
The Omicron variant, considered of concern by the World Health Organization (WHO), was detected in southern Africa, but since South African health authorities gave the alert on 24 November, infections have been reported in at least 110 countries.
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