COVID-19 ADMISSIONS SLOW DOWN

By Etambuyu Katota-The Ministry of Health says a key milestone has been recorded of less admissions than discharges in the past 24hours for the first time in three weeks.

Health Permanent secretary Technical Services KENNEDY MALAMA says the past epidemiological week, has seen fewer cases of 11,447 compared to 15,714 cases recorded a fortnight ago.

Dr. MALAMA says the overall positivity percentage is still high and indicates that there is continued high levels of community transmission.

He says among factors that have propagated the third wave is the circulation of the current variants.

Dr. MALAMA says the Zambia Genomic Sequencing Consortium has continued to support the genomic sequencing efforts in the country in collaboration with the Ministry’s surveillance teams to keep the country informed on the emergence of the variants.

He says the Zambia National Public Health Institute Reference Laboratory has been earmarked for COVID-19 testing certification by the African Society for Laboratory Medicine for Covid testing.

Dr. MALAMA has also disclosed that the country has received support from the United Arab Emirates in the fight against the pandemic.

He says in the last 24 hours, a total of 1,778 premises were inspected, of which 283 were closed, 153 were served with notices of improvement.

Dr. MALAMA says vaccines remain a high impact preventive intervention in the COVID 19 response strategy and in the last 24 hours, over 5000 Dose 1 and over 4000 Dose 2 AstraZeneca vaccinations have been administered.

He says in the last 24 hours, 940 new confirmed COVID-19 cases out of 5,166 tests conducted have been recorded with 47 deaths.

This is contained in a statement issued to ZNBC News in Lusaka today.

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