Mozambique: Three More Covid-19 Deaths and 24 New Cases
Maputo — After three days in which no deaths from the Covid-19 respiratory disease were registered, the Mozambican health authorities reported on Friday that three people had fallen victim to the disease in the previous 24 hours.
The latest victims were two women and one man, all of Mozambican nationality, and aged 63, 65 and 70. All three died in Maputo city. This brings the total death toll from Covid-19 in Mozambique to 831.
The number of deaths in the first 21 days of May was 17 – which is a reduction of 43.4 per cent when compared with the first 21 days of April.
According to a Ministry of Health press release, since the start of the pandemic, 542,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 1,466 of them in the previous 24 hours. Of the samples tested, 515 were from Maputo city, 186 from Maputo province, 164 from Manica, 135 from Niassa, 110 from Sofala, 89 from Nampula, 82 from Zambezia, 68 from Inhambane, 58 from Cabo Delgado, 48 from Tete and 11 from Gaza.
1,442 of the tests yielded negative results and 24 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brings the number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 70,551. Of the new cases identified on Friday, 14 were men and ten were women. Their nationalities had not yet been confirmed. One was a child under 15 years of age, and three were over 65 years old.
The majority of the new cases, 13 (54.2 per cent) were from Maputo city. There were also four cases from Niassa, four from Tete and three from Zambezia. There were no positive cases in any of the other seven provinces.
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The positivity rate (the proportion of those tested found to be infected) for Friday was 1.6 per cent – similar to the rates of the previous few days (1.4 per cent on Thursday, 1.7 per cent on Wednesday, 1.9 per cent on Tuesday and four per cent on Monday).
The Ministry release reported that in the same 24 hour period, three Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital, all in Maputo. No new patients were admitted.
The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres fell from 25 on Thursday to 19 on Friday. 12 of these patients (63.2 per cent) were in Maputo, three in Nampula, two in Zambezia and two in Tete. The Covid-19 wards in the other seven provinces were empty.
The Ministry also announced that on Friday a further 23 people were declared fully recovered from Covid-19 (19 in Sofala, three in Zambezia and one in Gaza). This brings the total number of recoveries to 68,868, or 97.6 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
The number of active Covid-19 cases fell from 850 on Thursday to 848 on Friday. The geographical distribution of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 376 (44.3 per cent of the total); Sofala, 268; Maputo province, 40; Nampula, 38; Niassa, 34; Manica, 25; Tete, 21; Inhambane, 20; Zambezia, 18; Gaza, seven; and Cabo Delgado, one.