Maputo — Mozambique’s National Director of Public Health, Rosa Marlene, announced in Maputo on Thursday that, with the diagnosis of a further six cases of the coronavirus that causes the respiratory disease Covid-19, the number of confirmed cases in Mozambique has risen from 156 to 162.
Speaking at the Health Ministry’s daily press conference on the Covid-19 crisis, Marlene said that, to date, 7,063 suspect cases have been tested, 294 of them in the previous 24 hours. 90 of the samples tested came from Maputo City, 73 from Maputo province, 34 from Cabo Delgado, 31 from Gaza, 27 from Sofala, 25 from Niassa, 11 from Tete, and three from Inhambane.
288 of those tested were negative, but six tested positive for the coronavirus. Marlene said that all six are Mozambican citizens. Four are asymptomatic and two have mild symptoms of Covid-19.
Two of the new cases are from Maputo City. One is a man, aged between 25 and 34, and the second is a woman, aged between 25 and 44. The woman had recently arrived in Maputo from the Afungi Peninsula, in Cabo Delgado, where she had been in quarantine.
Afungi is where the camp of the French oil and gas company Total is located, and this camp is the site of the largest cluster of Covid-19 cases in the country. The woman was probably infected weeks ago, and her viral load was found to be low.
In Changara district, in Tete, a woman aged between 15 and 24 tested positive. Marlene said she is a contact of the first case detected in Tete, who was diagnosed on 16 May.
In the town of Palma, in Cabo Delgado, three men, aged between 25 and 44, tested positive. This brings the number of confirmed cases in Palma to eight. This group of cases does not seem directly related to the cluster in Afungi, which is in Palma district.
All six new cases have been instructed to go into home isolation, and health workers are tracing their contacts.
The distribution of the 162 confirmed cases, by province, is as follows: Cabo Delgado, 88; Maputo City, 40; Maputo province, 20; Sofala, eight; Tete, two; Inhambane, two; Manica, one; Gaza, one. Three provinces have recorded no cases at all. They are Nampula and Zambezia, which are the two most populous provinces, and Niassa.
Of the positive cases, 126 are men and 36 are women. 121 are Mozambican citizens, and 41 are foreign nationals.
As of Thursday Mozambique’s key Covid-19 statistics were: 162 confirmed cases, of whom 48 have made a full recovery, and 116 are active cases. There have been no deaths, and one person is hospitalised.
Source: Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique