Pandemic accelerating in Mozambique – AIM

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Pandemic accelerating in Mozambique – AIM

6:47 CAT | 22 Jun 2021

Screen grab: MISAU on Facebook

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated in Mozambique over the past two weeks, the Deputy National Director of Public Health. Benigna Matsinhe, told a Maputo press conference on Monday.

In the past fortnight, 1,463 new cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed, but only 524 were diagnosed in the previous two weeks. Thus between the two periods, the number of new cases had almost tripled.

The number of Covid-19 patients with complications serious enough to demand hospitalisation had also increased over the same period from 32 to 101. That was a 215 per cent increase in hospitalisations, said Matsinhe.

She had no doubt that the main cause for the sharp increase in Covid-19 cases was “a general trend to ignore the measures needed to prevent and fight against this disease”.

Matsinhe warned that this situation “could rapidly lead the country to a third wave of infection, the consequences of which could be still worse than those of the second wave in January and February”.

She said the Health Ministry is following with particular concern the situation in the western province of Tete, where the positivity rate (the percentage of those tested who prove to be infected) has, over the past week been the highest in the country. The worst day for Tete was 16 June, when 135 samples were tested, of which 66 were positive for the coronavirus – a positivity rate of 48.9 per cent.

Since the start of the pandemic, 577,991 people have been tested for the coronavirus, 1,044 of them in the previous 24 hours.

924 of these tests gave negative results, while 70 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the total number of cases of Covid-19 diagnosed in Mozambique to 72,577. 66 of the new cases diagnosed on Monday are Mozambican citizens, and in four cases their nationality has yet to be confirmed. 40 were women or girls and 30 were men or boys. Nine were children under the age of 15, and four were over 65 years old.

31 of the positive cases were from Maputo city and 13 were from Maputo province. Thus Maputo city and province accounted for 62.8 per cent of the cases diagnosed on Monday. There were also 11 cases from Manica, five from Nampula, five from Inhambane, three from Gaza, one from Sofala and only one from Tete.

This does not mean that there has been a sudden, dramatic improvement in the situation in Tete. For only seven tests were carried out in Tete in the previous 24 hours, and Matsinhe did not explain this low number of tests.

Even so, one positive result out of seven tests is a positivity rate of 14.3 per cent, much higher than the national positivity rate on Monday of 6.7 per cent.

Matsinhe also reported that, over the same 24 hour period, five Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (three in Tete and two in Maputo). But 21 new patients were admitted to hospital – 15 in Maputo, four in Tete and two in Manica.

As of Monday, 65 people were under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres, compared with only 46 on Sunday. 37 of these patients (56.9 per cent) were in Maputo, 12 in Tete, five in Sofala, four in Matola, three in Inhambane, two in Manica and two in Nampula.

Matsinhe said that 46 of those hospitalised are men and 19 are women. 28 are over 60 years old, and 18 are aged between 45 and 59. She described the clinical condition of 33 of the patients as “moderate”, while 28 are seriously ill, and four are in a critical condition in intensive care.

Matsinhe announced that on Monday 192 people were declared fully recovered from Covid-19 (165 in Tete, 16 in Inhambane and 11 in Niassa). This brings the total number of recoveries to 70,241, or 96.8 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.

No deaths from Covid-19 were reported in this 24 hour period, and so the total Covid-19 death toll remains 848.

The number of active Covid-19 cases in the country fell from 1,606 on Sunday to 1,484 on Monday. The geographical location of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 723 (48.7 per cent of the total); Tete, 294; Maputo province, 202; Sofala, 68; Inhambane, 48; Manica, 41; Gaza, 36; Nampula 34; Niassa, 28; and Cabo Delgado, 20. Zambezia remains the only province that has no active Covid-19 cases.

Source: AIM