Mozambique: Covid-19 positivity rate falling – AIM report

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Mozambique: Covid-19 positivity rate falling – AIM report

7:05 CAT | 22 Mar 2021

File photo: Lusa

The Covid-19 positivity rate (the proportion of people tested found to be carrying the coronavirus that causes Covid-19) fell to 12.3 per cent on Sunday, according to figures released by the Ministry of Health.

This is the lowest positivity rate since the 6.3 per cent recorded on 5 January. This month the rate has been falling gradually. It has only gone above 20 per cent twice, and has never reached as much as 25 per cent. Alarming rates of 30 per cent or more were fairly common in February.

According to a Ministry of Health press release, on Sunday three further Covid-19 deaths were reported and 148 new cases.

The latest victims, who all died in Maputo city, were two men and one woman aged 67, 71 and 75. Two were Mozambicans and one was a foreigner, whose nationality was not revealed. This brings the total Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique to 746.

Since the start of the pandemic, 465,398 people have been tested for the coronavirus, 1,204 of them in the previous 24 hours. Of the samples tested, 403 were from Maputo city, 185 from Nampula, 185 from Gaza, 165 from Maputo province, 144 from Inhambane, 74 from Cabo Delgado, 32 from Niassa, eight from Manica and six from Tete. No tests were reported from Zambezia or Sofala.

1,056 of the tests gave negative results, and 148 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brought the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 66,212. Of the new cases, 146 were Mozambicans and two were foreigners (the Ministry, as has become usual, did not give their nationality). 77 were women or girls and 71 were men or boys. 14 were children under the age of 15, and a further 14 were over 65 years old. In two cases, no age information was provided.

The majority of the cases came from the far south – 67 from Maputo city and 27 from Maputo province. Thus Maputo city and province accounted for 63.5 per cent of the cases reported on Sunday, confirming that the capital and the surrounding area remain the epicentre of the Mozambican epidemic. There were also 19 cases from Gaza, 14 from Nampula, 10 from Inhambane, eight from Niassa, two from Tete and one from Cabo Delgado.

Over the same 24 hour period, 13 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (seven in Maputo, two in Matola, and one each in Inhambane, Sofala, Tete and Zambezia) and eight new cases were admitted (seven in Maputo and one in Tete).

As of Sunday, 128 people were under medical care in the Covid-19 wards (down from 136 on Saturday). 83 of these (64.8 per cent) were in Maputo. There were also 12 patients in Zambezia, 10 in Nampula, 10 in Sofala, seven in Matola, four in Inhambane, one in Gaza, and one in Tete. The Covid-19 isolation facilities in Cabo Delgado, Niassa and Manica remained empty.

The Ministry release also reported that 156 people made a full recovery from Covid-19 on Sunday (107 in Nampula and 49 in Zambezia). This brings the number of recoveries to 52,683, or 79.6 per cent of all those diagnosed in Mozambique with Covid-19.

The number of active Covid-19 cases in the country dropped slightly to 12,779 (down from 12,790 on Saturday). The geographical distribution of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 9,008 (70.5 per cent of the total); Maputo province, 1.949; Sofala, 507; Zambezia, 270; Nampula, 254; Niassa, 224; Inhambane, 223; Tete, 129; Gaza, 82; Cabo Delgado, 73; and Manica, 60.

Source: AIM