Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Mozambican government is considering imposing restrictions on people who are not yet vaccinated against the Covid-19 respiratory disease, President Filipe Nyusi declared in Maputo on Thursday.
Speaking at the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, where he was presenting his annual State of the Nation Address, Nyusi said such a move had been impractical until recently, because the country simply did not have enough vaccines for the entire population.
But now that problem has been largely overcome largely thanks to donations of vaccines from China and the United States. So, for the second time in a week, Nyusi floated the idea of banning access to public places for those who are unvaccinated.
He told the Assembly that currently Mozambique has in stock over 22.6 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines, with millions more on the way. This makes it possible to step up the current mass vaccination campaign, and vaccinate everybody over 18 years old.
According to a Thursday press release from the Health Ministry, 178,631 people were vaccinated in the previous 24 hours. To date, 5,038,870 people have been completely vaccinated against the disease, while 7,467.348 have received at least one dose of vaccine.
Nonetheless, the number of new Covid-19 cases is continuing to increase alarmingly, as is the positivity rate (the percentage of people tested found to be carrying the coronavirus that causes Covid-19)
Since the start of the pandemic, 1,016,028 people have been tested for the coronavirus, 4,462 of them in the previous 24 hours. 3,228 of these tests gave negative results, but 1,234 tested positive for the virus. This followed sharp rises in new cases over the past few days – rising from 733 cases on Tuesday to 975 on Wednesday, and now to 1,234. Thus is the highest number of new cases in a single 24 hour period since 7 August.
The total number of people diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique now stands at 156,729.
Of the new cases diagnosed on Thursday, 694 were women and 540 were men. 100 cases were children under 15 years of age.
This spurt of new cases is still largely restricted to Maputo city and province, which accounted for 68.4 per cent of the cases (472 in Maputo city and 369 in Maputo province). There were also 198 cases in Gaza, 92 in Inhambane, 59 in Manica, 21 in Sofala, 11 in Tete, nine in Cabo Delgado, and one each in Niassa, Nampula and Zambezia.
The positivity rate on Thursday was 27.62 per cent – much higher than the rates on Wednesday (24.06 per cent), Tuesday (19.15 per cent), and Monday (14.12 per cent). In Maputo city the positivity rate reached 30.47 per cent, and in Maputo province it was 33.82 per cent.
In the north, the positivity rate remains fairly low – 6.7 per cent in Cabo Delgado, and 1.7 per cent in Nampula and in Zambezia.
In the same 24 hour period, six Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (four in Maputo and two in Manica), and 14 new cases were admitted (10 in Maputo, and one each in Matola, Manica, Inhambane and Gaza).
The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres rose from 31 on Wednesday to 37 on Tuesday. 29 of these patients were in Maputo, four in Matola, two in Inhambane, one in Gaza, and one in Manica. Nobody was hospitalised with Covid-19 anywhere in the north of the country.
The Ministry release reported a further two deaths from Covid-19. One was a 65 year old woman who died in Maputo, and the other was a 10 year old boy, who died in Massinga district, Inhambane province. The total Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique now stands at 1,948.
191 people were declared to have made a full recovery from Covid-19 over the same 24 hour period, all of them in Maputo city. The total number of recoveries is now 150,206, or 95.8 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
Since the number of new cases far outstrips the number of recoveries, the number of active cases of Covid-19 is continuing to rise – from 3,530 on Wednesday to 4,571 on Thursday. The geographical breakdown of the active cases was as follows: Maputo city, 1,991 (43.6 per cent of the total); Maputo province, 1,527; Gaza, 448; Inhambane, 324; Manica, 162; Sofala, 42; Cabo Delgado, 34; Tete, 16; Zambezia, 10; Niassa, nine; and Nampula, eight.
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