Mozambique | COVID-19: Vaccination extended to teenagers

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Mozambique | COVID-19: Vaccination extended to teenagers

8:38 CAT | 23 May 2022

Photo: Twitter / @mlfornara

Mozambican Health Minister Armindo Tiago announced on Friday that vaccination against the Covid-19 respiratory disease will be extended in the near future to teenagers aged between 15 and 17.

So far the vaccination campaign has only covered adults. It has been highly successful: according to the Health Ministry’s statistics, to date almost 93 per cent of all Mozambican citizens aged 18 and above have been vaccinated.

Speaking in Maputo at a meeting with the Ministry’s cooperation partners, Tiago said “we shall continue to vaccinate the eligible population against Covid-19. That means that, in the coming months, with the support of our cooperation partners, we shall vaccinate people aged between 15 and 17, and later we shall consider other groups”.

Today the 1st Biannual Health Sector meeting took place – an opportunity to review results & progress. Under the leadership of the Minister @SaudeMisau, the @WorldBank handed over the chair of the Health Partner Group to @UNICEF_Moz. We look forward to this new role! pic.twitter.com/6z4GeD813G

— Maria Luisa Fornara (@mlfornara) May 20, 2022

Tiago admitted that the Ministry had been unable to comply with its Social and Economic Plan for 2021, which he blamed on the Covid-19 pandemic, jihadist terrorism in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, and the impacts of climate change in the central and northern provinces.

“Challenges persist in specific areas”, he said. “We want to approach the matter with some neutrality and without preconceptions. There are challenges in the areas of hospital facilities and equipment, the supply of medicines and other medical inputs, as well as legal and normative questions”.

In its latest press release, the Ministry of Health reports that on Friday 11 cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed. Seven of the new cases were women and four were men, and they were aged between 12 and 79. Four of the cases were from Maputo city, four from Maputo province, and one each from Gaza, Inhambane and Sofala.

Since the start of the pandemic, 1,322,377 people have been tested in Mozambique for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 611 of them in the previous 24 hours.

600 of these tests yielded negative results, while the 11 positive cases brought the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 225,557.

The positivity rate (the percentage of people tested found to be infected with the coronavirus) rose slightly from 1.72 per cent on Thursday to 1.8 per cent on Friday.

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.

One Covid-19 patient was discharged from hospital and one new case was admitted. The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 wards remained four, two in Maputo city and two in Maputo province. Two of these patients are in intensive care and are receiving supplementary oxygen.

Five people made a full recovery from Covid-19 on Friday, all of them in Cabo Delgado. The total number of recoveries now stands at 223,279 – which is 98.99 per cent of all cases of Covid-19 ever diagnosed in Mozambique.

The number of active cases of Covid-19 rose from 67 on Thursday to 73 on Friday. Most of the active cases were in the far south – 28 in Maputo province and 24 in Maputo city. There were also six cases in Cabo Delgado, four in Inhambane, three each in Gaza and Sofala, two in Niassa, and one each in Nampula, Tete and Manica. Zambezia remained the only province with no active cases.

The Ministry release also reported that in the previous 24 hours, a further 5,990 people had been vaccinated against Covid-19. The number of people fully vaccinated against the disease now stands at 14,111,633 – which is 92.8 per cent of all citizens aged 18 and above.

Source: AIM