Malawi has registered 160 new Coronavirus cases, taking the total number of recorded cases to 4,912.
Co-chairperson of the presidential taskforce on Coronavirus John Phuka announced the new cases on Thursday. He also announced 21 new recoveries, and one new death which has occurred in Lilongwe.
Of the new cases, 135 are locally transmitted and 25 are imported infections.
Out of the locally transmitted infections, 81 are from Blantyre, 24 from Lilongwe, five each from Dedza and Zomba, four in Nkhotakota, three in Machinga, two each from Balaka, Mzimba North, and Nkhata Bay, and one each from Mangochi, Mchinji, Mulanje, Mzimba South, Rumphi, Salima and Thyolo.
Twenty-two of the imported cases were identified among 628 returnees from South Africa, and three were identified through routine screening at the Mwanza border.
Malawi has recorded a total of 4,912 cases including 153 deaths. Of these cases, 1,071 are imported infections and 3,841 are locally transmitted.
Cumulatively, 2,550 cases have now recovered bringing the total number of active cases to 2,209. The average age of the cases is 36.8 years, the youngest case being aged 1 month, the oldest being 98 years old and 67 % are male.
The country has so far conducted 37,746 COVID-19 tests in 45 COVID-19 testing sites of which 1,995 tests have been done in the past 24 hours.
Phuka noted that there has been a drop in the positive rates among the returnees that are coming from South Africa.
“For instance, we had received 12 buses from South Africa 11th August with 628 fellow citizens on board and out of these 22 were confirmed positive,” he said.
He added that the local transmission in Malawi is 3.5 times higher than the imported cases hence there is need to focus our attention on stopping the community transmission by limiting the human to human transmission of COVID-19.
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