Maputo — Mozambique's National Director of Public Health, Rosa Marlene, announced on Tuesday that a further 20 cases of the Covid-19 respiratory disease have been diagnosed, bringing the total number of known Covid-19 cases in the country to 453.
Speaking in Maputo at the Health Ministry's daily press conference on the Covid-19 situation, Marlene said that, since the start of the crisis, 15,190 people have been tested in Mozambique for the coronavirus that causes the disease, 610 of them in the previous 24 hours.
The distribution of the 453 positive cases by province is as follows: Cabo Delgado, 164; Nampula, 136; Maputo City, 71; Maputo Province, 47; Sofala, 13; Niassa, 5; Tete, 5; Inhambane, 4; Manica, 3; Gaza, 3; Zambezia, 2.
As for the claim made by one World Health Organisation (WHO) official, Maria van Kerkhove, that transmission of Covid-19 by asymptomatic people is "very rare", the Director of Surveys of the National Health Institute, Sergio Chicumbe, politely dismissed it.
He pointed out that the reference to symptoms is often subjective - while the temperature of a patient can be readily measured, this was not the case with other Covid-19 symptoms, for which doctors depended on descriptions given by the patients themselves.
