AfricaPress-mozambique: The Mozambican health authorities reported on Sunday that, for the sixth time this month, the number of people diagnosed with the Covid-19 respiratory disease was in excess of 100.
According to a Ministry of Health press release, the number of new cases identified on Sunday was 140 – previous days with three digit figures were Saturday (244), Friday (194), Thursday (195), Wednesday (113), and 12 June (106). Prior to that, the last time the number of new cases had gone to over 100 was on 11 April.
Since the start of the pandemic, 576,947 people have been tested for the coronavírus that causes Covid-19, 1,238 of them in the previous 24 hours. Almost 54 per cent of the samples tested were from the far south – 476 from Maputo city and 192 from Maputo province. There were also 131 tests in Sofala, 117 in Nampula, 100 in Niassa, 77 in Tete, 64 in Manica, 53 in Inhambane, 19 in Cabo Delgado and nine in Zambezia. No tests were reported from Gaza.
1,098 of the tests yielded negative results and 140 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the number of people in Mozambique diagnosed with Covid-19 to 72,507. Of the new cases reported on Sunday, 129 are known to be Mozambican citizens and the nationalities of the other 11 have yet to be confirmed. 86 are men or boys and 54 are women or girls. Ten are children under the age of 15, and three are over 65 years old. In five cases, no age information was available.
35 of the new cases were from Maputo city, 31 from Maputo province, 23 from Sofala and 21 from Tete. Thus 78.6 per cent of the new cases came from those four provinces. There were also 11 cases from Inhambane, nine from Manica, eight from Nampula and two from Niassa. None of those tested in Cabo Delgado or Zambezia were positive.
The positivity rate (the proportion of those tested who prove to be infected) on Sunday was 11.3 per cent. But that is the national average. In three provinces the positivity rate was considerably higher – it was 27.3 per cent in Tete, 17.5 per cent in Sofala, and 16.2 per cent in Maputo province.
The national positivity rate has fallen somewhat – it was 17.9 per cent on Saturday, and 11.5 per cent on Friday.
The Ministry release also reported that, over the same 24 hour period, seven Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (three in Tete, two in Maputo and two in Sofala), but 12 new patients were admitted (seven in Maputo, three in Tete, one in Sofala and one in Matola).
As of Sunday there were 46 people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres (up from 42 on Saturday). 24 of these patients (52.2 per cent) were in Maputo, eight in Tete, five in Sofala, four in Matola, three in Inhambane, and two in Nampula.
The Ministry release said that on Sunday eight people, all of them in Inhambane, were declared as fully recovered from Covid-19. This brings the total number of recoveries to 70,049, or 96.6 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
One further death from Covid-19 was reported – an 89 year old Mozambican man who died in Maputo. Mozambique’s Covid-19 death toll now stands at 848.
The number of active Covid-19 cases has continued to rise – from 1,475 on Saturday to 1,606 on Sunday. The geographical distribution of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 692 (43.1 per cent of the total); Tete, 448; Maputo province, 189; Sofala, 67; Inhambane, 59; Niassa, 39; Gaza, 33; Manica, 30; Nampula, 29; and Cabo Delgado, 20. For the last three days there have been no active cases in Zambezia.
The statistics seem to confirm that currently the Covid-19 epidemic in Mozambique has two poles, one in Maputo and one in Tete.
