Mozambique has Covid-19 tests for next 6 months;: Only users with “typical” symptoms can give samples when they go to SNS health units – report

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Mozambique has Covid-19 tests for next 6 months;: Only users with “typical” symptoms can give samples when they go to SNS health units – report

6:23 CAT | 04 Feb 2021

FILE PHOTO: For illustration purposes only. [File photo: Lusa]

Mozambique has sufficient Covid-19 tests for the next six months and faces “no shortage”, contrary to information claiming a lack of tests, Deputy National Director of Public Health, Benigna Matsinhe, told Lusa today.

Matsinhe said that national health system laboratories carry out 1,000 Covid-19 tests per day, a sufficient number taking into account the sample collection capacity in the country’s health units and the criteria imposed on laboratory diagnosis.

Matsinhe said that only users with “typical” Covid-19 symptoms can give samples when they go to SNS health units, while asymptomatic cases cannot, perhaps creating “the feeling of a lack of tests”.

“The panic and anxiety that the country and the world are experiencing as a result of Covid-19 leads many people to seek tests without having typical symptoms. When they are denied the test, they are left with the feeling that there is a shortage,” Matsinhe said.

Also read: World Health Organisation calls on countries to ‘test, test, test’ people with coronavirus symptoms – Watch

Delays in delivering results might also create this impression, she added, saying: “The route and the time between the collection of samples in the health units and their forwarding to the laboratories may lead people to think that we have problems.”

In the next few days, a further one million Covid-19 tests will arrive in the country, further reinforcing stocks already available, Matsinhe said.

Last week, the Citizen’s Observatory for Health (OCS), a Mozambican non-governmental organisation, reported that there was a shortage of Covid-19 tests in Maputo hospitals, and that only people with severe symptoms were being tested.

Also read: Mozambique: Lack of tests in public sector hospitals causes discomfort for citizens looking for citizens looking for Covid-19 testing services – OCS

The finding is the result of a survey that the OCS says it carried out in the main hospital units in Maputo.

“Health organisations choose to test patients who have severe symptoms of the disease, which means that there are people who return home without being tested even after requesting a diagnosis,” a summary of the OCS’s research reads.

Mozambique has an accumulated total of 415 Covid-19 deaths and 41,433 positive cases, of which 62% are accounted fully recovered.

Worldwide, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused at least 2,253,813 deaths from the 103.8 million-plus cases of infection, according to a report by French press agency AFP.

In Portugal, 13,257 people died from 740,944 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate-General for Health.

The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December, 2019, in Wuhan, a city in central China.

Source: Lusa