AfricaPress-mozambique: The Mozambican health authorities reported on Wednesday that 436 people were diagnosed with the Covid-19 respiratory disease in the previous 24 hours, and that one in five of all the tests carried out were positive for the coronavírus that causes Covid-19.
This is the largest number of new cases in a single 24 hour period since 11 March.
According to a Wednesday Ministry of Health press release, since the start of the pandemic 581,440 people have been tested for the coronavirus, 2,167 of them in the previous 24 hours. Of the samples tested, 64 per cent were from the Covid-19 hotspots of Maputo and Tete – 963 from Maputo city, 171 from Maputo province and 252 from Tete. There were also 203 tests from Inhambane, 185 from Cabo Delgado, 173 from Niassa, 136 from Nampula, 55 from Manica, 38 from Sofala and one from Gaza. No tests were reported from Zambezia.
1,731 of the tests gave negative results, while 436 people tested positive for the coronavirus. Once again, the majority of these cases were from Maputo and Tete – 239 from Maputo city, 64 from Maputo province and 85 from Tete. There were also 25 positive cases in Niassa, 12 in Inhambane, eight in Manica, and one each in Cabo Delgado, Nampula and Sofala.
The national positivity rate (the proportion of those tested who prove to be infected) on Wednesday was 20.1 per cent – considerably higher than the rates earlier in the week (15.4 per cent on Tuesday, 6.7 per cent on Monday, 11.3 per cent on Sunday, and 17.9 per cent on Saturday).
But the Wednesday positivity rate was much higher in the three worst affected provinces – 33.7 per cent in Tete, 34.7 per cent in Maputo province, and 25.1 per cent in Maputo city.
Over the same 24 hour period five deaths from Covid-19 were reported. The latest victims were four men and a woman aged 37, 39, 40, 49 and 65. Two died in Tete, one in Maputo, one in Inhambane and one in Sofala. This brings the total Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique to 857.
The Ministry release added that the number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres rose from 78 on Tuesday to 88 on Wednesday. 55 of these patients (62.5 per cent) were in Maputo. There were also 11 patients in Tete, nine in Sofala, six in Matola, three in Nampula, two in Manica and two in Inhambane.
On Wednesday only 11 people, all from Sofala, were declared fully recovered from Covid-19. This brought the total number of recoveries to 70,300, or 96 per cent of all those diagnosed with the disease in Mozambique.
With the number of new cases greatly surpassing the number of recoveries, the number of active Covid-19 cases rose from 1,630 on Tuesday to 2,050 on Wednesday. The geographical location of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 1,089 (53.1 per cent of the total); Tete, 391; Maputo province, 252; Sofala, 66; Inhambane, 61; Niassa, 57; Manica, 53; Nampula, 36; Cabo Delgado, 23; and Gaza, 22. Zambezia remained the only province in the country where there were no active cases.
