Africa-Press – Mozambique. Mozambique has detected 17 cases of infection by the Covid-19 Omicron variant, Minister of Health Armindo Tiago has announced.
Minister Tiago said that the spread of Omicron “requires the strengthening of prevention measures”, including taking a vaccine against the new coronavirus.
“In all, the country now has around 17 cases of Omicron,” Armindo Tiago told journalists on the sidelines of the launch of the “vaccine caravan” in Maputo on Monday.
In November, the Mozambican health minister had announced that the country was investigating two Covid-19 cases filed that month and suspected of being the Omicron variant, one with mild symptoms and the other without any.
Armindo Tiago stated that “all [the cases] were confirmed”, putting Mozambique on the list of countries with confirmed cases of the new variant.
For the Minister of Health, the spread of Ómicron “requires the reinforcement of prevention measures”, including vaccination against the new coronavirus.
The ‘vaccine caravan’ visiting, in a pilot phase, places of greatest population density in Maputo, aims to speed up the process of immunization against Covid-19.
About 4.6 million Mozambicans have been fully vaccinated against the disease, and just over 7.1 million people have received the first dose, according to the health authorities.
Mozambique had, by Monday, registered 1,945 deaths among a total of 153,787 Covid-19 infections, of which 149,964 were deemed fully recovered.
Covid-19 has caused at least 5,304,397 deaths worldwide, among the more than 269 million infections by the new coronavirus registered since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the latest report by Agence France-Presse.
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in several countries.
The Omicron variant, classified as “worrying” by the World Health Organization (WHO), was identified in southern Africa, but since the South African health authorities raised the alarm on 24 November, infections have been reported in at least 57 countries across all continents.
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