Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Mozambican health authorities on Sunday reported a further 25 deaths from the Covid-19 respiratory disease, and 1,528 new cases.
According to a Sunday press release from the Ministry of Health, the latest victims were 17 men and eight women, all of them Mozambican citizens, and aged between 22 and 92. 19 of them died in Maputo, three in Matola, two in Gaza and one in Zambezia. {Five of the deaths reported on Sunday had been declared on Friday, July 23, eleven were declared on Saturday, July 24, and nine on Sunday.July 25.]
This brings the total Mozambican Covid-19 death toll to 1,282. Of these deaths, 404 (31.5 per cent) occurred this month.
Since the pandemic began, 703,161 people have been tested for the coronavírus that causes Covid-19, 4,480 of them in the previous 24 hours.
2.952 of the tests yielded negative results and 1,528 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brought the total number of people in Mozambique diagnosed with Covid-19 to 110,288. Of the new cases reported on Sunday, 1,509 were Mozambican citizens and 19 were foreigners (but the Ministry release did not give their nationalities).
837 of the cases were women and 691 were men. 180 were children under the age of 15, and 84 were over 65 years old. In 39 cases, no age information was available.
632 of the new cases (41.4 per cent) were from Maputo city. There were also 383 cases from Inhambane, 219 from Maputo city, 119 from Gaza, 84 from Niassa, 33 from Nampula, 29 from Tete, 14 from Sofala, nine from Zambezia, five from Manica and one from Cabo Delgado.
The national positivity rate (the proportion of those tested found to be infected with the virus) on Sunday was 34.1 per cent. So over a third of those tested were found to be carrying the virus. This was a substantial increase on the rate of 28.6 per cent found on both Friday and Saturday.
The province with the highest positivity rate – 60 per cent – was Zambezia, but that was on a small sample of 15 tests, nine of which were positive. Among the provinces with a more representative number of tests, the highest positivity rates were found in Maputo province (48.2 per cent), Inhambane (38.8 per cent), Manica (38.5 per cent), Maputo city (36.2 per cent), and Gaza (35.1 per cent). As has become normal in recent weeks, the lowest positivity rates were found in the northern provinces of Nampula (11.2 per cent) and Cabo Delgado (one per cent).
Over the same 24 hour period, 53 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (29 in Maputo, nine in Sofala, five in Manica, four in Matola, four in Niassa, and two in Tete), and 48 new cases were admitted (31 in Maputo, four in Niassa, three in Matola, two each in Zambezia, Tete, Manica and Sofala, one in Inhambane and one in Gaza).
The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres fell from 505 on Saturday to 475 on Sunday. The great majority of these patients – 330 (69.5 per cent) – were in Maputo. There were also 49 patients in Matola, 28 in Sofala, 19 in Tete, 14 in Inhambane, 11 in Zambezia, 10 in Niassa, six in Gaza, five in Manica, and three in Nampula. Cabo Delgado remained the only province where no Covid-19 patients were hospitalised.
The Ministry added that 151 people were declared fully recovered from Covid-19 on Sunday – 57 from Zambezia, 33 from Inhambane, 41 from Sofala, and 20 from Cabo Delgado. The total number of recoveries now stands at 82,767, which is 75.5 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
With new cases greatly surpassing recoveries, the number of active Covid-19 cases inevitably rose – from 24,884 on Saturday to 26,236 on Sunday. The geographical distribution of the active cases was as follows: Maputo city, 16.772 (63.9 per cent of the total); Maputo province, 4,188; Inhambane, 1,484; Manica, 827; Tete, 779; Sofala, 678; Niassa, 645; Gaza, 390; Nampula, 220; Zambezia, 210; and Cabo Delgado, 43.
