Maputo — The Mozambican government is hoping to delay the peak of infection by the Covid-19 respiratory disease by several months, according to Health Minister Armindo Tiago.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, at the end of a meeting of the Council of Ministers (Cabinet), Tiago said that delaying the peak (that is, the maximum number of infections) was a means of protecting the Mozambican health system, so that it would not be overwhelmed.
“Right now, what we are trying to do is push the peak to between December 2020 and February next year”, said Tiago.
Whether the government introduced restrictive measures more severe than those in the current state of emergency, would depend on the evolution of the pandemic, and the number of those infected was pertinent, he said.
Since the start of the crisis, only 39 cases of Covid-19 have been diagnosed, and the vast majority of these are in the northern province of Cabo Delgado (where there is a cluster of cases centred on the camp on the Afungi Peninsula run by the French oil and gas company Total), and in Maputo city. No cases at all have been detected in the two most populous provinces, Nampula and Zambezia.
As for what the government will do when the current state of emergency expires, on 30 April, Tiago thought the Council of Ministers should convene a meeting to draw up a balance sheet on implementation of the state of emergency.
“Then we shall see what decision should be taken on whether to maintain the current measures or make them more severe”, he said.
Since the start of the crisis, only 39 cases of Covid-19 have been diagnosed, and the vast majority of these are in the northern province of Cabo Delgado (where there is a cluster of cases centred on the camp on the Afungi Peninsula run by the French oil and gas company Total), and in Maputo city. No cases at all have been detected in the two most populous provinces, Nampula and Zambezia.
As for what the government will do when the current state of emergency expires, on 30 April, Tiago thought the Council of Ministers should convene a meeting to draw up a balance sheet on implementation of the state of emergency.
“Then we shall see what decision should be taken on whether to maintain the current measures or make them more severe”, he said.
Tiago downplayed the polemic over the forecast made on Monday by the Minister of State Administration, Ana Comoana, that 20 million Mozambicans (two thirds of the entire population, children included) would become infected with Covid-19.
As the National Health Institute (INS) made clear, this projection is a worst case scenario. Comoana, however, did not say this, and her power point presentation gave the impression that there was something inevitable about 20 million Mozambicans falling ill with Covid-19 over the next six months.
Tiago said that Comoana’s figures were a scenario for planning purposes, since when a new disease appears, such as Covid-19, there is always a need to guarantee an adequate response and planning, which would include diagnosis of patients, treatment, and availability of fundamental requirements such as beds and medicines.
It is general practice, he added, to draw up three scenarios – a worst case scenario, an intermediate scenario, and an optimistic scenario.
The pessimistic scenario, with 20 million infected, assumes no measures to mitigate the spread of the disease. The intermediate scenario assumes 12 million Mozambicans will become infected, while in the optimistic scenario, the figure falls to three million.
In the optimistic scenario, Tiago said most of those infected would show no symptoms. Some would show mild symptoms and a very small number would have serious symptoms which could lead to their hospitalisation.
The Minister said Mozambique has been working on this modelling with other countries and universities, citing in particular a study by the British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, which predicted an apocalyptic scenario for Mozambique with 28.6 million people infected (94 per cent of the entire population), 455,000 hospitalised, of whom over 85,000 would be in critical condition, and 73,000 deaths.
These figures imply that the pandemic in Mozambique would be much worse than in China, the United States or anywhere in Europe. But there is not the slightest sign so far of any of this happening – given that, to date, Mozambique has just 39 known cases of Covid-19 and no deaths.
The model used by the Mozambican authorities, said Tiago, takes other factors into consideration, and so even its worst case scenario is very different from Ferguson’s. Under the Mozambican worst case scenario the predicted number of deaths is 26 – a very long way from Ferguson’s 73,000.
Tiago noted that Mozambique is far from the only country for which the Ferguson model predicts disaster. The projection for Kenya, for example, is 30 million cases.
Source: Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique