Mozambique: Health Minister warns of possible Covid-19 fifth wave – AIM report

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Mozambique: Health Minister warns of possible Covid-19 fifth wave – AIM report

8:35 CAT | 04 May 2022

File photo: Lusa

Mozambican Health Minister Armindo Tiago has warned of the possibility that a fifth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic may hit the country.

Cited by the independent television station STV, Tiago said the main concern was the current increase in Covid-19 cases in neighbouring South Africa.

Although this had been predictable, Tiago warned that the increase in cases could be reflected in Mozambique, if the public let its guard down and abandoned preventive measures.

“Our experience with the previous waves is that, whenever a wave begins in South Africa, the increase in the number of cases also happens in Mozambique”, said the Minister.

Nonetheless, because of the success of Mozambique’s mass vaccination campaign, Tiago expected these new cases to be mild, and unlikely to result in hospitalisation or death.

According to the Health Ministry’s daily bulletins on Covid-19, new cases are being diagnosed at the rate of just a handful a day. Thus the latest Ministry press release said that on Monday only one case was identified, a 37 year old Mozambican man diagnosed in Gaza province.

Since the start of the pandemic, 1,313,728 people have been tested in Mozambique for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 301 of them in the previous 24 hours.

300 of these tests yielded negative results, while the one positive case brought the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 225,387.

The positivity rate (the percentage of those tested found to be carrying the virus) fell from 0.89 per cent on Sunday to 0.33 per cent on Monday.

Once again, the Ministry release reported no further deaths from Covid-19, and so the total death toll in Mozambique from the disease remains 2,201.

There was just one Covid-19 patient in hospital, in Manica province. He was in intensive care, receiving supplementary oxygen. All the other Covid-19 facilities throughout the country were empty.

The Ministry release reported five recoveries from Covid-19, all of them in Maputo city. This brought the total number of recoveries to 223,138, which is which is slightly more than 99 per cent of all cases of Covid-19 ever diagnosed in Mozambique.

The number of active cases of Covid-19 fell from 48 on Sunday to 44 on Monday. The geographical distribution of the active cases was as follows: Gaza, 15; Cabo Delgado, six; Sofala, five; Tete, four; Maputo city, four; Inhambane, four; Nampula, two; Zambezia, two; Manica, one; Maputo province, one. Niassa was the only province without any active cases.

The release added that, in the previous 24 hours, 972 people had been vaccinated against Covid-19. The total number vaccinated now stands at 13,898,334, which is 91.4 per cent of all citizens aged 18 and above.

Source: AIM