The Mozambican Parliament has ratified the declaration of a state of emergency announced by President Filipe Nyusi on Monday in order to halt the spread of the respiratory disease, Covid-19.
The declaration, which takes effect from Wednesday, will strengthen the measures of obligatory quarantine.
It instructs that anyone who has entered Mozambique in the last two weeks must go into quarantine, including all the 23,000 Mozambicans, who returned to the country from South Africa last Thursday and scattered across the southern provinces.
The measures cover all people, who have been in direct contact with anyone diagnosed with Covid-19, must also go into quarantine for 14 days.
People, who break quarantine will be confined to their homes, or put into “an adequate establishment”.
The decree also imposes that all religious services, political events, cultural, recreational and tourist activities are banned, with the exception of matters of state or social events that cannot be delayed.
The main “social events” exempted are funerals. The events allowed must all follow the preventive measures decreed by the Ministry of Health.
According to the decree, all means of passenger transport, whether publicly or privately owned, must implement preventive measures.
The government hopes it will not have to move to phase four, which would be a lockdown, with a curfew confining people to their homes, the closure of all but essential activities, and drastic restrictions on transport.
Meanwhile, the Mozambique’s Health Ministry announced in Wednesday that a returning 18-year-old Mozambican national, who studies in Portugal and a 60-year-old South African citizen are the two latest confirmed coronavirus cases. The new cases bring the total number in the country to 10.
The National Director of Public Health in Mozambique, Rosa Marlene, told a media briefing in the capital Maputo on Wednesday that 284 suspects had been tested and that 17 had been tested in the past 24 hours.
“So far, eight cases tested positive by the institutions of the Ministry of Health and two more in private laboratories bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 10 positive cases,” Marlene said
CM/GIK/APA