Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Mozambican health authorities on Sunday reported a further 938 cases of the Covid-19 respiratory disease.
This follows 1,139 cases diagnosed on Saturday, 869 on Friday and 801 on Thursday. Thus, in the first four days of July, 3,747 new cases of the disease were identified, making it almost certain that July will be the worst month for Covid-19 infections since February.
According to a Sunday press release from the Health Ministry, since the start of the pandemic, 611,476 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 3,470 of them in the previous 24 hours.
Of the samples tested, 1,574 (45.4 per cent) were from Maputo city, 370 from Manica, 325 from Nampula, 267 from Sofala, 223 from Maputo province, 215 from Niassa, 167 from Gaza, 152 from Tete, 112 from Cabo Delgado, 62 from Inhambane and three from Zambezia.
2,532 of the tests gave negative results, while 938 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 80,151.
Once again the majority of positive cases came from the known Covid-19 hotspots of Maputo and a band of territory in the centre of the country covering Tete, Manica and Sofala provinces. There were 540 cases in Maputo city, 50 in Maputo province, 126 in Manica, 84 in Sofala and 68 in Tete.
There were also 32 cases in Niassa, 16 in Nampula, 14 in Gaza, seven in Inhambane and one in Cabo Delgado. None of the three people tested in Zambezia was positive.
The national positivity rate (the proportion of those tested found to be infected with the virus) on Sunday was 27 per cent. This compares with 31.8 per cent on Saturday, 23.3 per cent on Friday, 27.9 per cent on Thursday, and 24.4 per cent on Wednesday. Thus, over the past few days around a quarter of those tested have proved positive.
There are, however, great variations between the provinces. Tete has the highest positivity rate, of 44.7 per cent, followed by Maputo city (34.3 per cent), Manica (34.1 per cent), Sofala (31.5 per cent) and Maputo province (22.4 per cent).
But the trend of the past few weeks continues, with the provinces north of the Zambezi showing much lower positivity rates – 14.9 per cent in Niassa, 4.9 per cent in Nampula, 0.9 per cent in Cabo Delgado, and zero in Zambezia (because no positive cases were identified in that province on Sunday),
The Ministry release also announced that a further seven people have died from Covid-19. The latest victims were six men and one woman, all of them Mozambican citizens and they included a six year old child. Four of them died in Maputo province, two in Maputo city and one in Sofala.
Over the same 24 hour period, 17 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (15 in Maputo and two in Manica). But 50 new cases were admitted (45 in Maputo, three in Sofala and two in Manica). The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres rose from 203 on Saturday to 228 on Sunday. 173 of these cases (75.8 per cent) were in Maputo, 21 in Tete, 18 in Sofala, three each in Niassa, Zambezia and Matola, two in Manica and one each in Nampula and Gaza. Cabo Delgado remained the only province where no Covid-19 patients were hospitalised.
The Ministry also reported that on Sunday only six people were declared fully recovered from Covid-19, all of them in Zambezia. The total number of recoveries now stands at 71,634, which is 89.4 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
The number of active Covid-19 cases rose from 6,684 on Saturday to 7,609 on Sunday. Just four days earlier, at the end of June, there were only 4,317 active cases.
The geographical distribution of the active cases was as follows: Maputo city, 3,536 (46.5 per cent of the total); Tete, 1.513; Maputo province, 1,064; Sofala, 573; Manica, 393; Inhambane, 150; Gaza, 148; Niassa, 116; Nampula, 46; Zambezia, 37; and Cabo Delgado, 33.
