Mozambique: Second wave of coronavirus infections over

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Mozambique: Second wave of coronavirus infections over

6:20 CAT | 25 Apr 2021

File photo: O País

Mozambique’s National Health Institute (INS) announced on Friday that the second wave of coronavirus infections is over.

The INS General Director, Ilesh Jani, made this claim in Maputo on Friday when presenting a study on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on institutions of higher education.

He based his optimism on the sharp decline in the number of new cases of Covid-19. The Ministry of Health’s daily summaries used to how hundreds of new cases a day- but that is now down to a few dozen.

The number of people hospitalised with Covid-19 has been falling fairly steadily throughout April and is now less than 40 in the entire country. The number of deaths has also fallen with almost half the days in April recording no Covid-19 deaths at all.

“As for the current trend of the epidemic in our country”, said Jani, “what we have noted is a reduction in transmission in general across Mozambique in recent weeks. There are some exceptions – we are still seeing substantial levels of transmission in Zambezia, Nampula and Niassa province, where about ten per cent of the samples we test are positive for Covid-19. The average positivity rate nationally is about six per cent. With the exception of these provinces, the general trend in the country is one of reduction. So we can, with some certainty, say that the second wave of transmission in Mozambique is over”.

This does not mean that the disease has been defeated yet – that will only happen, Jani said, when enough of the population has become immune, notably through the vaccination campaign now under way.

There was no room for complacency. Jani insisted on the need for “scrupulous compliance with the measures of prevention against the pandemic, since we don’t know how long it will last”.

“We know that the pandemic will not end next month”, he added. “We should know that it will last for some years – but we don’t know how many years”.

The second wave hit Mozambique in early January, and was much more severe than the first wave. In January alone, the number of new cases, deaths and hospitalisations was larger than in all of 2020. The explosion of cases in January was clearly linked to the relaxation of preventive measures over the Christmas and New Year holidays, plus the spread from South Africa of a new variant of the coronavirus.

But the situation had now greatly improved, and the rate of occupation of beds in the Covid-19 treatment centres “is very low”, said Jani, “which shows that infected people are no longer developing serious problems which justify hospitalisation”.

In Maputo, which had been the epicentre of the second wave, today only seven per cent of intensive care beds are occupied.

But a third wave of the virus has already hit some African countries, and could prove worse than the first or second waves. Jani stressed this is why preventive measures must be upheld.

The second wave may be over, but people are still falling ill and dying of Covid-19. The Saturday press release from the Health Ministry said that, in the previous 24 hours, there had been 46 new cases and one death.

The new victim was a 23 year old Mozambican woman who died in Maputo city. This brings the total number of Covid-19 deaths in Mozambique to 807.

Since the start of the pandemic, 511,476 people have been tested for the coronavirus, 1,383 of them in the previous 24 hours. Over half of these tests were held in the far south – 454 in Maputo city and 258 in Maputo province.

1,337 of the test yielded negative results, and 46 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the total number of people diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique to 69,643.

Of the cases diagnosed on Saturday, 41 were Mozambican citizens, and the nationalities of the other five have not yet been confirmed. 24 were men or boys and 22 were women or girls. One case was a child under the age of five, and three were over 65 years old. No age information was available in a further three cases.

31 of the new cases (67.4 per cent) were from the Greater Maputo Metropolitan Area (Maputo and Matola cities, and the adjacent districts of Boane and Marracuene). There were also six cases from Niassa, three from Manica, and two each from Zambezia, Inhambane and Gaza.

Over the same 24 hour period, four Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital, all in Maputo, and three new cases were admitted, also all in Maputo.

As of Saturday, 39 people were under medical care in the Covid-19 wards (down from 41 on Friday). 27 of the patients (69.2 per cent) were in Maputo, four in Nampula, three in Inhambane, two in Zambezia, two in Sofala and one in Matola.

The Ministry release reported that on Saturday 44 people were declared fully recovered from Covid-19 (24 in Maputo province, and 20 in Zambezia). The total number of recoveries now stands at 62,452, or 89.7 per cent of all those diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.

The number of active Covid-19 cases rose slightly on Saturday to 6,380 (up from 6,379 on Friday). The geographical distribution of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 4,372 (68.5 per cent of the total); Maputo province, 793; Nampula, 318; Sofala, 297; Niassa, 168; Zambezia, 140; Inhambane, 137; Cabo Delgado, 65; Tete, 45; Gaza, 32; and Manica, 13.

Source: AIM