A three weeks old baby has become Zimbabwe’s latest COVID-19 casualty, bringing the cumulative number of deaths to 102.
By Michael Gwarisa
The baby is also the youngest case and death to have ever been reported in the country since the disease was reported in Zimbabwe in March this year.
According to the Ministry of Health and Child Care’s (MoHCC) daily update, the baby together with other five deaths were recorded yesterday.
Today we regret to report five deaths which were recorded from 3-5 August 2020 in the community and an admission to casualty departments at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals and other hospitals after investigations and postmortems were done.
“These include two males and two females from Harare province and a baby aged three weeks from Matabeleland North province and had respiratory symptoms compatible with COVID-19 and the PCR results were positive for COVID-19,” said the Ministry of Health.
Yesterday, a total 1 575 Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDT) screening tests and 961 Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) diagnostic tests were done. The cumulative number of tests done date is 147 026 (77 923 RDT and 69 103 PCR).
To date, the total number of confirmed cases of the COVID-19 in Zimbabwe since 20 March 2020 is 4 451, 1345 recovered, 3 004 active cases and 102 deaths.
According to government however, the number of recoveries has been encouraging of late and they called citizens to observe physical distancing, wear masks and sanitise as required by the World Health Organization (WHO).
