Mozambique: Illegal migrants being tested for Covid-19 – AIM report

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Mozambique: Illegal migrants being tested for Covid-19 – AIM report

4:29 CAT | 08 May 2020

The Mozambican health authorities are testing for the respiratory disease Covid-19 all the people who entered the country illegally from South Africa on Thursday morning, according to the National Director of Public Health, Rosa Marlene.

The National Immigration Service (SENAMI) told a Thursday press conference that 225 Mozambican citizens had returned to the country illegally from the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal. They crossed at the Ponta do Ouro border post, which the South African authorities closed in late March.

But later on Thursday, speaking at the Ministry of Health’s daily press conference on the Covid-19 pandemic, Marlene said the police informed the Ministry that 231 people had crossed the border. However, only about 60 of these people are under Health Ministry control.

They have been moved from the border to the Maputo municipal district of Katembe, where they are under police supervision. An epidemiological surveillance team is screening them and taking samples for Covid-19 tests.

Marlene could not explain the discrepancy in numbers, and said the health authorities are working with the Ministries of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs to sort the matter out.

The pandemic has continued to rage in South Africa, despite the restrictions imposed on movement under the lockdown imposed by the South African government. As of Thursday, South African had 7,808 confirmed cases of Covid-19, of whom 153 have died. There is understandable fear that people entering Mozambique clandestinely from South Africa might bring the virus with them.

Whether there are 60 or 225 of them, the group that arrived on Thursday morning is likely to fan out across all the southern provinces (Maputo, Gaza and Inhambane) which have long operated as a labour reserve for South African mines and farms. Marlene confirmed that many of those in Katembe plan to travel on to Gaza or Inhambane.

Neither of these provinces has yet reported any cases of Covid-19 at all, and the Health Ministry hopes to keep it that way.

On Monday the Malawian authorities reported two imported cases of the disease – one from Tanzania and the other from Mozambique. The latter is a 41 year old truck driver from Lilongwe who tested positive for Covid-19 after returning to Malawi from the central Mozambican port of Beira.

According to Malawian Health Minister Jappie Mhango, the truck driver returned from Beira on Saturday. He went to hospital on Monday with slight symptoms of Covid-19, and a test proved he was positive for the disease.

It is premature to assume that the truck driver caught the disease in Beira. Covid-19 has an incubation period of up to 14 days. He might have caught the disease in Mozambique, in Malawi, or anywhere else he has visited in that period.

Marlene told the reporters that the Health Ministry is in contact with Malawi via the World Health Organisation (WHO), to ask for more details about the case. The health directorate in Beira has been alerted. So far no cases of Covid-19 have been detected in Beira, or anywhere else in Sofala province.

Another problem was posed by the failure to screen or test passengers who arrived in Maputo on board an Ethiopian Airways flight. Ethiopian Airways is one of few airlines that still operate scheduled flights to Maputo – yet there was nobody from the health authorities to meet the passengers off that flight.

Marlene blamed this on a communication breakdown. She said that the Health Ministry, in collaboration with the police and with the airline itself, was tracking down the passengers and had found 31 of them, who are now being screened.

Marlene told the press conference that to date the authorities have tested 3,188 suspected cases of Covid-19, 147 of them in the previous 24 hours. All 147 tested negative.

64 of the samples tested came from the northern province of Cabo Delgado, where by far the largest cluster of Covid-19 cases has been found, centred on the camp of the French oil and gas company Total, at the Afungi Peninsula, in Palma district.

40 of the samples came from Maputo city, 20 from Maputo province, 12 from Manica, six from Sofala and five from Niassa.

Marlene said that, in the previous 24 hours three more Covid-19 cases have made a complete recovery, raising the number of recoveries from 21 to 24. Two of the recovered cases were from Maputo city, and the third was from Cabo Delgado. All three were asymptomatic, and were kept in home isolation until tests showed they were free of the virus.

Mozambique’s key Covid-19 statistics, as of Thursday, are: 81 positive cases, of whom 24 have made a full recovery and 57 are active cases, and no deaths.

Source: AIM