AfricaPress-mozambique: Key indicators for the Covid-19 respiratory disease, suggest a significant worsening of the pandemic in Mozambique.
On Friday the Health Ministry reported a large increase in the number of new cases, an increase in the positivity rate, an increase in the number of people hospitalised, and a rise in the number of active cases.
According to the daily Ministry press release, since the start of the pandemic, 574,348 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 1,680 of them in the previous 24 hours. Of the samples tested, just under half came from the far south – 543 from Maputo city and 288 from Maputo province. Thus 49.4 per cent of all the tests on Friday came from Maputo city and province.
The second hot spot for Covid-19 is the western province of Tete, where there were 166 tests. There were also 267 samples tested from Inhambane, 106 from Nampula, 96 from Gaza, 93 from Sofala, 55 from Manica, 43 from Cabo Delgado, 20 from Niassa, and three from Zambezia.
1,486 of the tests yielded negative results, and 194 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 72,123. Friday was the fourth time this month that the number of new cases exceeded 100 – the other dates were Thursday (165 cases), Wednesday (113), and last Saturday (106). Prior to that, the last time the number of new cases had gone to over 100 was on 11 April.
Of the new cases reported on Friday, 192 are Mozambican citizens, and the nationality of two has yet to be confirmed. 103 were women or girls and 92 were men or boys. 14 were children under the age of 15, and nine were over 65 years old.
65 of the positive cases were from Maputo city, 45 from Maputo province and 59 from Tete. So between them, the Maputo and Tete hot spots accounted for 87.1 per cent of all the cases reported on Friday. There were also eight cases from Inhambane, seven from Gaza, four from Sofala, three from Niassa, two from Manica and one from Nampula. None of the samples tested in Cabo Delgado or Zambezia were positive.
The positivity rate (the proportion of those tested who prove to be infected) reported on Friday was 11.5 per cent. This is the first time the positivity rate has gone to over ten per cent since 2 April.
But this figure is the national average – in most provinces, the positivity rate is much lower, but in two it is much higher: it is 15.7 per cent in Maputo province and an alarming 35.5 per cent in Tete.
The Ministry release also reported that on Friday two Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (one in Tete and one in Nampula), but nine new cases were admitted (four in Tete, three in Maputo, and two in Sofala).
As of Friday. 40 people were under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres (up from 33 on Thursday – a 21.2 per cent rise). 18 of these patients (45 per cent) were in Maputo, nine were in Tete, six in Sofala, three in Inhambane, two in Nampula and two in Matola.
The Ministry release said that on Friday only two people, both in Zambezia, were declared fully recovered from Covid-19. This brings the total number of recoveries to 70,030, or 97.1 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
With the number of new cases greatly outstripping the recoveries, the number of active Covid-19 cases has inevitably risen – from 1.053 on Thursday to 1,245 on Friday. The geographical distribution of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 580 (46.6 per cent of the total); Tete, 312; Maputo province, 147; Inhambane, 62; Niassa, 37; Sofala, 26; Gaza, 23; Nampula, 21; Cabo Delgado, 20; and Manica, 17. There are now no active cases at all in Zambezia province.
