Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Mozambican health authorities on Wednesday announced a further 90 new cases of the Covid-19 respiratory disease, overwhelmingly in the north of the country.
According to a Ministry of Health Wednesday press release, 77 of the new cases (85.6 per cent) were from the four provinces north of the Zambezi – 56 in Niassa, 11 in Cabo Delgado, seven in Nampula and three in Zambezia.
The seven provinces of central and southern Mozambique only supplied 13 of the new cases (14.4 per cent) – seven in Inhambane, three in Maputo city, and one each in Manica, Sofala and Gaza. No cases were reported from Tete or from Maputo province.
Since the start of the pandemic, 904,100 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 2,199 of them in the previous 24 hours. 2,109 of the tests yielded negative results, while 90 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 150,662.
Of the new cases identified on Wednesday, 51 were men or boys and 39 were women or girls. Six were children under the age of 15 and five were over 65 years old.
The positivity rate (the percentage of those tested found to be carrying the virus) was 4.1 per cent on Wednesday, rather higher than the rates on Tuesday or Monday, of 2.4 and 2.1 per cent.
In the same 24 hour period, three Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (two in Nampula and one in Maputo), and five new cases were admitted (two in Maputo and one each in Cabo Delgado, Inhambane and Gaza).
The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres fell slightly from 33 on Tuesday to 32 on Wednesday. 17 of these patients (53.1 per cent) were in Maputo. There were also six patients in Nampula, three in Inhambane, two in Cabo Delgado, two in Niassa, one in Zambezia and one in Gaza. No Covid-19 patients were hospitalised in the other four provinces.
The Ministry release also reported three more Covid-19 deaths. The victims were all Mozambican men, aged 45, 48 and 80. Two of them died in Nampula and one in Inhambane. This brings the total Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique to 1,915.
Over the same 24 hour period, 123 people were declared to have made a full recovery from Covid-19 (109 in Maputo province, 11 in Inhambane and three in Zambezia). The total number of recoveries now stands at 146,966 or 97.5 per cent of all those diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
The number of active Covid-19 cases fell from 1,813 on Tuesday to 1,777 on Wednesday. The geographical breakdown of the active cases was as follows: Maputo city, 798 (44.9 per cent of the total), Nampula, 406; Maputo province, 198; Cabo Delgado, 158; Niassa, 82; Inhambane, 47; Gaza, 38; Zambezia, 25; Sofala, 16; Manica, five; and Tete, four.
