Mozambique: Number of daily Covid-19 cases goes over 1,000 again – AIM report

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Mozambique: Number of daily Covid-19 cases goes over 1,000 again – AIM report

6:50 CAT | 17 Feb 2021

Picture: NBC

The Mozambican health authorities have announced that on Tuesday 1,109 new cases of the Covid-19 respiratory disease were diagnosed.

This is the seventh time that the number of new cases in a single 24 hour period has surpassed 1,000. From the identification of the first case, on 22 March 2020, up to the end of the year the daily total never reached four figures. But three times in January and now four times in February the psychological barrier of 1,000 has been breached.

The previous occasions on which over 1,000 new cases were diagnosed were:

20 January – 1,126

26 January – 1,274

29 January – 1,275

3 February – 1,173

4 February – 1,055

11 February – 1,054.

A press release from the Health Ministry also reported four more deaths from Covid-19. These victims were three men and one woman, all of Mozambican nationality, and aged between 40 and 71.

All four deaths occurred in Maputo city. The total Covid-19 death toll now stands at 551. The majority of these deaths – 430 (78 per cent) –happened in the capital.

Since the start of the pandemic, 388,277 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 3,343 of them in the previous 24 hours. Of the samples tested, 1,186 were from Maputo city, 432 from Gaza, 362 from Maputo province, 347 from Inhambane, 343 from Tete, 230 from Sofala, 218 from Nampula, 82 from Cabo Delgado, 70 from Manica, 42 from Zambezia, and 31 from Niassa.

2,234 of the tests gave negative results, and 1,109 people tested positive for the coronavirus. The positivity rate (the proportion of people tested who are carrying the virus) was 33.2 per cent. So almost a third of all those tested were positive. This compares with 23 per cent on Monday, 33 per cent on Sunday, and 24.6 per cent on Saturday.

Of the cases diagnosed on Tuesday, 1,101 are known to be Mozambican citizens, and the nationalities of the other eight have yet to be confirmed. 559 are women or girls and 550 are men or boys. 88 are children under the age of 15 and 64 are over 65 years old. In 36 cases, no age information was available.

364 of the new cases were from Maputo city and 106 were from Maputo province. So between them Maputo city and province contributed 42 per cent of the cases reported on Tuesday. There were also 177 cases in Gaza, 150 in Sofala, 103 in Tete, 101 in Inhambane, 36 in Nampula, 29 in Cabo Delgado, 18 in Nampula, 14 in Zambezia, and 11 in Manica.

Over the same 24 hour period, 23 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (17 in Maputo, four in Inhambane, one in Gaza and one in Sofala), but 36 new patients were admitted (32 in Maputo, and one each in Cabo Delgado, Sofala, Gaza and Matola).

The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 wards has risen to 292 (up from 283 on Monday). The great majority – 234 (80.1 per cent) – are in Maputo. There are also 13 patients in Matola, 11 in Zambezia, eight in Sofala, eight in Tete, six in Nampula, five in Inhambane, three in Niassa, two in Gaza, one in Cabo Delgado and one in Manica. Thus there is at least one Covid-19 patient in an isolation ward in all eleven provinces.

The Ministry release also reported that a further 315 people have made a full recovery from Covid-19 (141 in Niassa, 112 in Tete, 50 in Manica and 12 in Zambezia). This brings the total number of recoveries to 32,262, which is 62.3 per cent of all those diagnosed with the coronavirus in Mozambique.

With the number of new cases continuing to outstrip the number of recoveries, the number of active Covid-19 cases inevitably rises, hitting a new record of 18,983 on Tuesday.

The geographical distribution of the active cases was as follows: Maputo city, 10,408 (54.8 per cent of the total); Maputo province, 2,712; Sofala, 2,267; Inhambane, 911; Cabo Delgado, 748; Gaza, 575; Niassa, 351; Nampula, 267; Manica, 262; Tete, 260; and Zambezia, 222.

Source: AIM