Staff Writer
AFTER the festive season scare which resulted in a spike in Covid-19 cases in January and February 2020, the situation seems to be normalising with Lesotho recording a highest of 289 cases in one day in the last one month.
According to the National Covid-19 Secretariat’s latest statistics, Lesotho has now recorded 10 525 cases and 309 Covid-19 related deaths as of Tuesday.
In the last one month, 9439 tests have been conducted recording 1278 positive cases. In recent weeks, the cases have even become less and NACOSEC has often recorded zero cases on some days.
The latest figures come as a welcome development as the cases had gone out of control.
In January, NACOSEC chief executive officer (CEO), ‘Malitaba Litaba, told our sister publication the Sunday Express that the Covid-19 pandemic had become a crisis hence why NACOSEC advised Prime Minister Moeketsi Majoro to impose the lockdown on 14 January.
Dr Litaba said the Covid-19 positivity rate had massively increased after the Christmas holidays by almost 50 percent.
She said a month before the festive period, the positivity rate had been hovering between 12 and 14 percent.
The massive increase, she said, had led to the high death rates being experienced now which were “shocking”.
“The situation became worse after the Christmas holidays when the positivity rate increased at an alarming rate hence our advice to the government to implement a hard lockdown. For Covid-19 to be managed properly, our positivity rate should be below five percent,” Dr Litaba said.
She said it was now clear to everyone that the positivity rate had shot up in the past four weeks “from a manageable to the crisis stage”; indicating about 13, 5 percent in the positivity rate.
The situation looks set to improve further after the government yesterday launched the mass vaccination programme in Morija.
