Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Mozambican health authorities announced on Saturday that, in the previous 24 hours, 1,139 people were diagnosed with the Covid-19 respiratory disease.
This followed 801 positive cases reported on Thursday and 869 on Friday.
Saturday was the day with the fourth highest number of new cases since the pandemic began. The worst day so far was 29 January, at the peak of the second wave of infection, when 1,275 cases were diagnosed in a single 24 hour period.
According to a Saturday press release from the Ministry of Health, 608,006 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 3,579 of them in the previous 24 hours. Of the samples tested, 1,396 were from Maputo city, 675 from Tete and 335 from Maputo province. Thus the confirmed Covid-19 hotspots of Maputo and Tete accounted for 67.2 per cent of all the tests carried out.
There were also 291 tests in Sofala, 268 in Manica, 243 in Inhambane, 147 in Nampula, 107 in Cabo Delgado, 79 in Gaza, 27 in Zambezia and 11 in Niassa.
2,240 of the tests gave negative results, and 1,139 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 79,213.
Maputo and Tete accounted for the great majority of Saturday’s positive cases – 521 in Maputo city, 307 in Tete and 97 from Maputo provinces. This was 81.2 per cent of all the positive cases. There were also 115 positive cases in Sofala, 51 in Manica, 32 in Inhambane, 13 in Gaza, two in Nampula and one in Zambezia. No positive cases were reported from either Cabo Delgado or Niassa.
The national positivity rate (the proportion of those tested found to be infected with the virus) on Saturday was 31.8 per cent – much higher than the rates earlier in the week (23.3 per cent on Friday, 27.9 per cent on Thursday, 24.4 per cent on Wednesday, 23.4 per cent on Tuesday, and 14 per cent on Monday),
The national average hides enormous differences between the provinces. Three provinces have positivity rates that are much higher than the average. Tete set a dismal record for the day with a 45.5 per cent positivity rate, followed by Sofala (39.5 per cent), and Maputo city (37.3 per cent).
But north of the Zambezi Saturday’s positivity rates were less than five per cent – 3.7 per cent in Zambezia, 1.4 per cent in Nampula and zero in Cabo Delgado and Niassa, since there were no positive cases in those provinces.
The Ministry release also announced that a further nine people have died from Covid-19. The latest victims were five men and four women, all Mozambican citizens, and aged between 26 and 96. Six of them died in Maputo, one in Tete, one in Sofala and one in Matola. This brings the total Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique to 897.
Over the same 24 hour period, 19 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (eight in Maputo, six in Sofala, four in Tete, and one in Niassa), but 32 new cases were admitted (26 in Maputo, three in Sofala, two in Tete, and one in Gaza).
The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres rose from 199 on Friday to 203 on Saturday. The great majority of these patients – 146 (71.9 per cent) were in Maputo. There were also 21 patients in Tete, 16 in Sofala, seven in Matola, three in Zambezia, three in Inhambane, three in Niassa, two in Manica, and one each in Nampula and Gaza. Cabo Delgado is now the only province where there are no patients in the Covid-19 wards.
The Ministry also reported that on Saturday only 19 people were declared fully recovered from Covid-19 (13 in Inhambane and six in Zambezia). The total number of recoveries now stands at 71,628, which is 90.4 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
The number of active Covid-19 cases in the country has continued to rise, from 5,573 on Friday to 6,684 on Saturday. The geographical distribution of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 2,998 (44.9 per cent of the total); Tete, 1,445; Maputo province, 1,018; Sofala, 489; Manica, 267; Inhambane, 143; Gaza, 134; Niassa, 84; Zambezia, 43; Cabo Delgado, 32; and Nampula, 30.
