Mozambique: Another Covid-19 death and 174 new cases reported on Saturday – AIM report

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Mozambique: Another Covid-19 death and 174 new cases reported on Saturday – AIM report

8:01 CAT | 04 Jan 2021

File photo: Lusa

The Mozambican health authorities on Saturday (January 2) announced another death from the Covid-19 respiratory disease and 174 positive cases.

According to a press release from the Health Ministry, the latest victim was a 70 year old Mozambican woman, hospitalised in a Maputo city health unit. Despite medical care her condition did not improve and she died on Saturday morning. This brings the total Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique to 168.

The Ministry release said that, since the start of the pandemic, 274,746 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 1,417 of them in the previous 24 hours. Of the samples tested, 642 were from Maputo city, 403 from Cabo Delgado, 181 from Inhambane, 48 from Sofala, 45 from Maputo province, 44 from Nampula, 23 from Tete, 11 from Gaza, 10 from Manica, and 10 from Zambezia. No tests were reported from Niassa.

1.243 of the tests gave negative results, and 174 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique, since the first case was identified on 22 March, to 18,968.

All the new cases are Mozambicans. 94 are men or boys and 80 are women or girls. 21 are children under the age of 15 and six are over 65 years old. In two cases no age information was given.

The new cases came overwhelmingly from Maputo city (108) and Maputo province (38). Thus Maputo city and province accounted for 84 per cent of the cases reported on Saturday. There were also 11 cases from Gaza, ten from Zambezia, six from Tete and one from Manica.

The Ministry release said that in the previous 24 hours seven Covid-19 patients were discharged from Maputo city hospitals, but 12 new patients were admitted (ten in Maputo, one in Nampula and one in Tete). Currently, 61 people are under medical care in the Covid-19 isolation wards (50 in Maputo, four in Nampula, three in Tete, two in Zambezia, one in Sofala and one in Manica).

In the same 24 hour period, only four people were reported as making a full recovery from Covid-19, all of them in Inhambane. The full number of recoveries is now 16,684, which is 88 per cent of all those in Mozambique diagnosed with the coronavirus.

The number of active Covid-19 cases has risen to 2,112. They are distributed as follows: Maputo city, 1,567 (74.2 per cent of the total); Maputo province, 137; Nampula, 112; Cabo Delgado, 94; Cabo Delgado, 63; Niassa, 45; Tete, 35; Zambezia, 23; Manica, 18; Gaza, 11; Inhambane, seven.

Television footage of the New Year’s Eve festivities must have come as an enormous disappointment to Health Ministry officials, since across the country the advice given to revelers on social distancing, avoiding crowds and wearing masks was openly flouted.

From the footage shot by crews of the independent television station STV, in Maputo, Beira, Nampula and Inhambane, virtually nobody at the New Year’s parties, apart from policemen and the TV reporters themselves, were wearing masks, and there was not the slightest sign of social distancing. This was true regardless of whether the festivities took place in hotels, or in the open air.

This reckless behaviour could well be reflected in increases in Covid-19 cases in the coming few weeks.

Source: AIM