By: Victoria Pinto
Minister of Health, Sílvia Lutucuta, admitted at a press conference that the country runs the risk of registering a sharp increase in Covid-19, if the Angolan population does not comply with the rules of the state of emergency decreed by the President of the Republic.
When highlighting the importance of complying with the social isolation rule, the minister highlighted that if the population does not comply with this measure, the country will possibly see an accelerated increase in infections of the new coronavirus.
“If the measures reflected in the state of emergency are not complied with, we will run the risk of, in the next 15 days, experiencing an accelerated increase in cases”highlighted Sílvia Lutucuta.
Angola has so far recorded seven positive cases of Covid-19, relating to travelers who returned to Angola in recent weeks from Portugal.
The minister recalled that so far Angola has only recorded imported cases, adding that there is a public health emergency for which all Angolans are called to collaborate.
“We can assume that the country is in home quarantine, the secret is to start isolation, people comply, mass screening of suspected cases is carried out and, as soon as positive cases are detected, isolate, isolate and isolate, in order to guarantee that the transmission chain is not so fast”.
The minister also made it known that the number of people in institutional quarantine (currently there are more than a thousand) has been increasing, due to the entry of people who were intercepted at land borders and others who were identified as violating home quarantine.
The minister also mentioned that Angola is also participating in research work on the behavior of the disease, as comorbidities (Presence or association of two or more diseases in the same patient) are not the same as in the four corners of the world. In Angola, there is a significant burden of endemic infectious diseases, so it is not known how Covid-19 will behave in conjunction with diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and malnutrition.