Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Mozambican health authorities on Tuesday reported 221 new cases of the Covid-19 respiratory disease.
According to a Tuesday press release from the Ministry of Health, since the pandemic began, 880,166 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 2,056 of them in the previous 24 hours.
1,835 of the tests yielded negative results, while 221 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 149,480. Of the new cases identified on Tuesday, 119 were women or girls, and 102 were men or boys.
Almost every day this month the majority of new Covid-19 cases have been women, reversing the gender balance for most of the pandemic, when the majority of cases had been male. 25 of the new cases are children under the age of 15, and 12 are over 65 years of age. For six cases, no age information was available.
77.8 per cent of the new cases came from the four provinces north of the Zambezi – 65 from Nampula, 49 from Niassa, 36 from Cabo Delgado and 22 from Zambezia.
Only 22.2 per cent of the cases were from the seven southern and central provinces – 21 from Maputo city, 14 from Inhambane, eight from Gaza, three from Maputo province, one from Manica and none at all from Sofala.
The positivity rate (the proportion of those tested found to be carrying the coronavirus) on Tuesday was 10.8 per cent. The rates over the previous few days were 7.4 per cent on Monday, 10.2 per cent on Sunday, 7.9 per cent on Saturday, and eight per cent on Friday.
The provinces with the highest positivity rates on Tuesday were all in the north – Nampula (21.7 per cent), Zambezia (17.6 per cent) and Cabo Delgado (17.1 per cent). Apart from Sofala, where there were no positive cases, the lowest rates were reported from Tete (2.5 per cent) and Maputo city (3.9 per cent).
In the same 24 hour period, 10 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (five in Nampula, three in Maputo, one in Matola and one in Niassa), and six new cases were admitted (five in Maputo and one in Matola).
The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment facilities fell from 63 on Monday to 58 on Tuesday. 23 of these cases (39.7 per cent) were in Maputo. There were also 16 patients in Nampula, eight in Niassa, three in Cabo Delgado, two each in Zambezia, Manica and Inhambane, one in Tete and one in Gaza. No Covid-19 patients were hospitalised in either Sofala or Matola.
Over the previous 24 hours, 203 people were declared fully recovered from Covid-19 (154 in Gaza and 49 in Zambezia). The number of recoveries now stands at 142,831, or 95.3 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
The Ministry release reported just one death from Covid-19 on Tuesday, a 40 year old Mozambican women who died in Maputo province. The total Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique now stands at 1,895.
The number of active Covid-19 cases rose slightly from 5,183 on Monday to 5,200 on Tuesday. The geographical distribution of the active cases was as follows: Maputo city, 2,054 (39.5 per cent of the total); Nampula, 1,093; Maputo province, 727; Cabo Delgado, 576; Niassa, 300; Zambezia, 151; Inhambane, 144; Gaza, 104; Sofala, 20; Manica, 20; and Tete, 11.
