Maputo — The Mozambican health authorities on Monday reported many more recoveries from the Covid-19 respiratory disease than new cases, thus bringing down the number of active Covid-19 cases.
A Ministry of Health Monday press release said that 4,486 people were declared to have made a complete recovery. The great majority of these – 3,389 – were in Maputo city. There were also 411 recoveries in Inhambane, 211 in Maputo province, 74 in Gaza and 40 in Manica.
The total number of recoveries now stands at 107,443, which is 80.7 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.
Since the start of the pandemic, 779,449 people have been tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, 2,840 of them in the previous 24 hours. 2,117 of the tests gave negative results, while 725 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This brought the total number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique to 133,177.
Monday was the second consecutive day in which the number of new cases reported was less than 1,000 (after the 653 cases reported on Sunday).
Of the new cases, 408 were women or girls and 317 were men or boys. 67 were children under the age of 15, and 48 were over 65 years old. In 19 cases, no age information was available.
265 of the cases reported (36.6 per cent of the total) were from Maputo city. There were 94 cases from Niassa, 83 from Inhambane, 82 from Zambezia, 69 from Gaza, 50 from Nampula, 25 from Sofala, eight from Tete, four from Cabo Delgado and one from Manica.
The national positivity rate (the proportion of those tested found to be infected by the virus) on Monday was 25.5 per cent – much the same as the rate on the previous few days (26 per cent on Sunday, 24.6 per cent on Saturday, 23.5 per cent on Friday, and 26.6 per cent on Thursday.
The provinces with the highest positivity rates on Monday were Niassa (41.4 per cent), Maputo province (38.6 per cent), Zambezia (34.2 per cent), Maputo city (30.5 per cent) and Gaza (28.4 per cent). As has become normal, the lowest positivity rate, of 4.1 per cent, was found in the northern province of Cabo Delgado.
In the same 24 hour period, 39 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (19 in Maputo, 10 in Niassa, four in Sofala, three in Gaza, two in Inhambane and one in Zambezia), and 28 new cases were admitted (16 in Maputo, three in Matola, three in Gaza, two in Zambezia, two in Inhambane, one in Niassa and one in Manica).
For the second consecutive day, more Covid-19 patients left hospital than entered. The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres fell from 402 on Sunday to 376 on Monday. The majority of these patients – 254 (67.6 per cent) – were in Maputo. There were also 51 patients in Matola, 15 in Inhambane, 13 in Sofala, 11 in Niassa, 11 in Zambezia, six in Tete, six in Gaza, five in Nampula, and four in Manica. Cabo Delgado remained the only province where no Covid-19 patients were hospitalised.
215 of those hospitalised were men and 161 were women. 138 of the patients (36.7 per cent) were aged 60 or above, and 122 (34.7 per cent) were aged between 45 and 59. The Ministry described the clinical condition of 113 of the patients as “moderate”. 213 were seriously ill, and 24 were in a critical state. Those 24 are in intensive care, while 324 are receiving supplementary oxygen.
Because of the large number of recoveries, the number of active Covid-19 cases fell from 27,878 on Sunday to 24,102 on Monday. The geographical distribution of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 10,432 (43.3 per cent of the total); Maputo province, 6,039; Inhambane, 1,607; Sofala, 1,531; Gaza, 1,175; Manica, 958; Niassa, 804; Zambezia, 794; Nampula, 472; Tete, 208; and Cabo Delgado, 82.