Maputo — The Mozambican health authorities on Saturday reported a further seven cases of the Covid-19 respiratory disease.
According to a Saturday press release from the Ministry of Health, since the start of the pandemic, 1,306,062 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 321 of them in the previous 24 hours.
314 of these tests yielded negative results, while the seven positive cases brought the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 225,323.
The new cases identified on Saturday were six women and one man, all of Mozambican nationality, and aged between 15 and 80. Four were diagnosed in Gaza, two in Maputo city, and one in Cabo Delgado.
The positivity rate (the percentage of those tested found to be carrying the virus) rose from 0.27 per cent on Friday to 2.18 per cent on Saturday.
In this same 24 hour period there was no change in the hospitalisation of Covid-19 patients. No Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital and no new cases were admitted. The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 wards remained static at four – two in Maputo and two in Niassa. One of the Maputo patients is in intensive care, receiving supplementary oxygen.
The Ministry reported no further deaths from the disease on Wednesday, and so the Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique remained 2,200. The last time a Covid-19 death was reported was on 20 March.
No recoveries were reported on Saturday, and so the total number of recoveries from Covid-19 remained 223,071, which is almost exactly 99 per cent of all cases of Covid-19 ever diagnosed in Mozambique.
The number of active cases of Covid-19 rose from 41 on Friday to 48 on Saturday. The geographical distribution of the active cases was as follows: Cabo Delgado, 13; Nampula, 11; Maputo city, 10; Gaza, six; Manica, three; Inhambane, three; Zambezia, one; and Tete, one. There were no active cases in Niassa, Sofala or Maputo province.
The release also reported that over the previous 24 hours only 70 people were vaccinated against Covid-19 (68 in Tete and two in Cabo Delgado). The total number of people fully vaccinated against the disease now stands at 13,599,302 – which is 89.4 per cent of all citizens aged 18 and above.
The province with the best vaccination rate is Nampula, which has vaccinated 105.1 per cent of its target figure, followed by Tete (98.2 per cent) and Manica (92.4 per cent). The extraordinarily high figure in Nampula may be due to the large number of people who have fled into the province to escape terrorist attacks in neighbouring Cabo Delgado.
By far the lowest vaccination rate is in the province where vaccination should be easiest, Maputo city