Africa-Press – Mozambique. Mozambican Health Minister Armindo Tiago, speaking at a press conference in Maputo on Tuesday, announced that two possible cases of the omicron variant of the Covid-19 respiratory disease have been detected, one in Maputo city and one in Inhambane province.
Tiago said these two cases will be confirmed, or denied, through genetic sequencing over the next few days.
The cases were discovered through a re-examination of all samples that tested positive for Covid-19 throughout November. One of the cases was asymptomatic, and the other had slight Covid-19 symptoms.
“Neither of these two people have a history of travelling outside the country”, said Tiago. “So, unless there is proof to the contrary, it seems to us that these are mutations that may have occurred locally, unless they were in contact with someone else who was infected earlier”.
Tiago called for calm, and stressed that there is no reason for panic. “Our country continues to record a favourable epidemiological situation”, he said. “Currently there is no scientific evidence that shows the omicron variant has a greater potential for transmission and, most importantly, no evidence that it causes more serious illness or that it is immune to the current vaccines”.
The Minister stressed that the measures to prevent the spread of the omicron variant are exactly the same as for any other Covid-19 variant.
Nonetheless, the government is stepping up vigilance at the borders, including genome surveillance, which should catch any cases of omicron, and is preparing the health system for a possible fourth wave of the pandemic.
As of Tuesday, 213 cases of the new variant had been detected in 18 countries. A preliminary analysis, said Tiago, indicated that many of the people carrying this variant of the virus had mild Covid-19 symptoms, or no symptoms at all, “but we need to accumulate more scientific evidence in order to understand the clinical profile of the cases of Covid-19 caused by the new strain”.
Meanwhile, the latest daily press release from the Ministry of Health says that on Tuesday 20 new cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed. Ten were women and ten were men and their ages varied from one year to 53. 75 per cent of the new cases were from the far south – eight from Maputo city and seven from Maputo province. There were also four cases from Gaza and one from Zambezia.
According to the release, since the start of the pandemic, 977,894 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 1,449 of them in the previous 24 hours. 1,429 of these tests yielded negative results. The 20 positive cases pushed the total number of cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 151,548.
The positivity rate (the percentage of those tested who are positive for the coronavirus) on Tuesday was 1.38 per cent. This was the first time since 16 November that the positivity rate had gone above one per cent.
Over the same 24 hour period, no Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital, and one new patient was admitted, in Maputo. The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres rose from three on Monday to four on Tuesday, all of them in Maputo.
The Ministry release reported that 22 people were declared on Tuesday to have made a full recovery from Covid-19 (16 in Cabo Delgado, four in Manica and two in Zambezia). The total number of recoveries now stands at 149,514, or 98.1 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
No deaths from Covid-19 were reported on Tuesday. The Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique remain 1,941.
The number of active Covid-19 cases fell from 91 on Monday to 89 on Tuesday. The geographical distribution of the active cases was as follows: Maputo city, 27; Nampula, 19; Maputo province, 13; Cabo Delgado, 10; Niassa, eight; Gaza, seven; Zambezia, four; and Manica, one. There were no active cases in Sofala, Tete or Inhambane provinces.
The release reported that 85,772 people were vaccinated against Covid-19 in the previous 24 hours. The number of people fully vaccinated against the disease rose to 3,931,200, and 6,572,756 had received at least one dose of the vaccine.
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