Maputo — The Mozambican health authorities on Thursday registered a further 36 positive cases of the coronavirus that causes the Covid-19 respiratory disease, raising the total number of people infected in the country since the start of the pandemic to 352.

Speaking in Maputo at the daily Health Ministry press conference on the Covid-19 crisis, the National Director of Public Health, Rosa Marleyn, said that so far 12,096 suspect cases have been tested in Mozambique, 529 of them in the previous 24 hours.

Three of the new cases, a boy under the age of 15 and two adult women, are from Maputo City, and two others, a boy under 15 and an adult woman, are from Marracuene district in Maputo province.

The distribution of positive Covid-19 cases by province, as of Thursday, was as follows: Cabo Delgado, 150; Nampula, 87; Maputo City, 60; Maputo Province, 24; Sofala, 12; Niassa, five; Tete, five; Inhambane, three; Gaza, three; Zambezia, two; Manica, one.

Samo Gudo regarded the increase in the number of children infected by the coronavirus, as a sign that the pandemic in Mozambique might be moving from its current classification as "an epidemic with foci of transmission" towards the far more dangerous phase of "community transmission", in which the disease will spread more widely, with a danger that a large number of cases, all needing medical assistance at the same time, could overwhelm the health service.