Mozambique: Spurt in new Covid-19 cases, but only in the south – AIM report

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Mozambique: Spurt in new Covid-19 cases, but only in the south – AIM report

6:01 CAT | 13 Jun 2022

File photo: MISAU

The Mozambican health authorities on Thursday reported a further 85 new cases of the Covid-19 respiratory disease.

This was the third consecutive day in which over 80 cases were diagnosed (there were 81 on Tuesday and 83 on Wednesday).

This is a sharp increase on the situation in April and May when only a handful of new cases were reported a day. But the new cases appear to be mild – very few of them are hospitalised, and the Covid-19 death rate is almost negligible.

According to a Thursday press release from the Ministry of Health, 44 of the new cases were women and 41 were men. 80 were Mozambican citizens and five were foreigners (as is normal practice, the release did not give their nationalities). 13 were under 15 years of age (including an infant under one year old), and the oldest was 78.

The recent spurt in new cases is restricted almost exclusively to the southern provinces. 80 of the cases (94.1 per cent) came from the four provinces south of the Save river, the conventional boundary between southern and central Mozambique. There were 54 cases from Maputo city, 21 from Maputo province, three from Inhambane and two from Gaza. The other five cases were all from the northern province of Cabo Delgado.

Since the start of the pandemic, 1,333,295 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 801 of them on Thursday. 716 of these tests yielded negative results, and the 85 positive cases brought the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 226,233.

The positivity rate (the percentage of people tested found to be carrying the virus) rose slightly, from 9.74 per cent on Wednesday to 10.61 per cent on Thursday.

The Ministry release reported no deaths from Covid-19 on Thursday. The total death toll from the disease in Mozambique thus remains 2,206.

One Covid-19 patient was discharged from hospital (in Niassa) on Thursday, and no new cases were admitted. Three people remained under care in the Covid-19 wards, all of them in Maputo city. None of them were in intensive care.

13 people were declared on Thursday to have made a full recovery from Covid-19, all of them in Gaza. The total number of recoveries now stands at 223,627, which is 98.88 per cent of all cases of Covid-19 ever diagnosed in Mozambique.

The number of active Covid-19 cases rose from 324 on Wednesday to 396 on Thursday. The geographical distribution of the active cases was as follows: Maputo city, 188; Maputo province, 135; Gaza, 37; Cabo Delgado, 16; Inhambane, 12; and two each from Niassa, Nampula, Manica and Sofala. There were no active cases in Zambezia or Tete.

Thus, between them Maputo city and province accounted for 81.6 per cent of all active Covid-19 cases.

The Ministry release also reported that, over the previous 24 hours, a further 3,415 people were vaccinated against Covid-19. The total number fully vaccinated against the disease now stands at 14,314,375, which is 94.1 per cent of all citizens aged 18 and above.

Source: AIM