AfricaPress-mozambique: The Covid-19 pandemic continued to worsen in Mozambique on Thursday, particularly in Maputo and Tete provinces.
In the space of just three days, 1,075 new cases of the disease have been reported, 441 of them on Thursday. The health authorities also announced that in the same period, 15 people have died from Covid-19, six of them in the previous 24 hours.
The latest victims were four men and two women, all Mozambican citizens, aged between 15 and 86. Three of the deaths occurred in Maputo, one in Matola, one in Manica and one in Sofala. This brings the total Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique to 863.
The number of Covid-19 deaths in the first 24 days of June was 29. In the same period of May, it was 17. So between the two periods there was an increase in deaths of 70.6 per cent.
According to a Ministry of Health Thursday press release, since the start of the pandemic, 583,387 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 1,947 of them in the previous 24 hours. 63.9 per cent of these tests took place in the Covid-19 hotspots of Maputo and Tete – 752 in Maputo city, 199 in Maputo province and 294 in Tete.
There were also 227 tests in Cabo Delgado, 170 in Sofala, 114 in Nampula, 111 in Inhambane, 17 in Gaza and four in Zambezia, No tests were reported from Niassa.
1,596 of the tests yielded negative results and 441 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 73,652. Of the new cases identified on Thursday, 415 are Mozambican citizens and six are foreigners (but, as normal in its press releases, the Ministry did not give their nationalities). As for the other 20, their nationalities have yet to be confirmed.
230 of the new cases were men or boys and 211 were women or girls. 49 were children under the age of 15, and 16 were over 65 years old. In 14 cases, no age information was available.
The vast majority of these cases were from Maputo and Tete – 161 from Maputo city, 130 from Tete, and 98 from Maputo province. Thus these three provinces accounted for 88.2 per cent of all positive cases. There were also 37 from Sofala, seven from Manica, four from Gaza, three from Nampula and one from Cabo Delgado. None of those tested in Zambezia or Inhambane were positive.
The national positivity rate (the proportion of those tested who prove to be infected) on Thursday was 22.7 per cent, the highest so far this month – it compares with 20.1 per cent on Wednesday, 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.
The positivity rate is far higher in Maputo province where almost one in every two (49.2 per cent) of those tested was found to be infected, and in Tete, with a rate of 44.2 per cent. The rates in Maputo city (21.4 per cent) and in Sofala (21.7) are slightly below the average. The authorities can take some comfort from the low positivity rates in the north – 2.6 per cent in Nampula, and 0.4 per cent in Cabo Delgado.
Over the same 24 hour period, 14 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (nine in Maputo, two in Tete, and one each in Sofala, Inhambane and Matola). But 35 new patients were admitted (21 in Maputo, seven in Tete, three in Niassa, three in Sofala, and one in Matola).
The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres rose from 88 on Wednesday to 103 on Thursday. 64 of these patients (6.1 per cent) were in Maputo, 16 in Tete, 10 in Sofala, five in Matola, three in Niassa, three in Nampula, one in Manica and one in Inhambane.
The Ministry release added that 52 people were declared completely recovered from Covid-19 on Thursday (24 from Manica, 19 from Maputo province, and four from Gaza). The total number of recoveries now stands at 70,352, which is 95.5 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
Because the number of new cases continues to surpass the number of recoveries, the number of active Covid-19 cases is also continuing to grow. There were 2,433 active cases on Thursday (up from 2.050 on Wednesday). The geographical distribution of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 1,247 (51.3 per cent of the total); Tete, 521; Maputo province, 330; Sofala, 102; Inhambane, 61; Niassa, 57; Nampula, 39; Manica, 35; Cabo Delgado, 19; and Gaza, 22. Zambezia remains the only province where there are no active Covid-19 cases.
