Prepare for ‘a new normal’ , Health Institute warns – AIM report

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Prepare for ‘a new normal’ , Health Institute warns – AIM report

11:20 CAT | 14 Jun 2020

Mozambicans should prepare for “a new normal”, warned the General Director of the National Health Institute (INS), Ilesh Jani, on Friday.

Speaking at the Health Ministry’s daily press briefing on the Covid-19 pandemic, Jani became the first senior Mozambican official to brush aside the idea that everything can return to what it was before the pandemic.

It was no longer likely that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 could be defeated in a matter of months. “We will have to learn to live with the virus”, said Jani. That would mean “new ways of working in teams, new models for meeting, for travelling, for organising public events, and for holding funerals”.

He praised the Maputo municipal council, and other municipalities, who are already thinking about how to reorganize markets, so that these become places less likely to spread Covid-19, and thus less dangerous to both vendors and consumers.

He warned that the coronavirus is not likely to disappear this year – Mozambicans would be living with it throughout 2021 as well.

As for when Mozambican schools might re-open, Jani said “all countries are applying experimental measures of relaxation, to relaunch their economies, and lead life to normality, to a new normality.

But so far, Jani pointed out, none of the measures imposed by the Mozambican government under the state of emergency have been relaxed. As long as there is no vaccine against the coronavirus, the only way of staving off disaster as to abide strictly by these restrictive measures – which include a ban all religious, political, cultural and other activities likely to attract crowds, the restriction of travel to the minimum necessary, the wearing of masks in public, and social distancing of at least 1.5 metres between individuals, particularly in places such as shops and markets.

On the current state of the pandemic in Mozambique, Jani said that, since the start of the crisis, 16,919 people have been tested for the coronavirus, 884 of them in the previous 24 hours. 464 of these were tested in the INS’s own laboratory, and the remainder in the private Maputo laboratories authorized to carry out the tests.

864 of these tests proved negative, and 20 were positive for Covid-19. This brings the number of positive cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 509. Jani said that 18 of the new positive cases are Mozambican citizens, and two are foreigners (a Briton and a Malawian). They include ten children, five adolescents and five adults.

Eight of the cases are from the northern city of Nampula, eight from Maputo city, and one each from Mecanhelas district, in Niassa province, from Vilanculos, in Inhambane province, from Pemba, capital of Cabo Delgado, and from the southern city of Matola.

All 20 cases show mild symptoms of Covid-19. All have been instructed to go into home isolation, in line with standard Health Ministry procedure, and health staff are tracing their contacts.

Jani announced that three Covid-19 patients remain hospitalised in the isolation ward in Nampula city. One more patient has made a full recovery from the disease, so that to date 144 of the people who tested positive are now free of the disease.

As of Friday, the breakdown of the 509 positive cases by province was as follows: Cabo Delgado, 173; Nampula, 154; Maputo City, 81; Maputo Province, 57; Sofala, 13; Inhambane, 11; Niassa, six; Tete, five; Gaza, four; Manica, three; Zambezia, two.

Meanwhile, Mozambique’s basic Covid-19 statistics as of Sunday (June 14) are as follows: 583 confirmed cases, of which 151 have made a full recovery and 428 active cases, Four Covid-19 patients have died, three from the disease itself, and one from an unrelated cause.