One person died at Harare Polytechnic early this week,
while another was reported dead at the Kwekwe school. Fourteen members of staff
reportedly tested positive during a routine testing at Harare Polytechnic.
In Mashonaland West province, Karoi town, which was put
under localised lockdown last week, also lost its town engineer, Oswell
Mazvimbakupa, to COVID-19-related complications.
Media reports state that COVID-19 tracker infections are
increasing in Zimbabwe, with an average of 119 new infections reported each
day.
Mpilo Central Hospital acting chief executive officer
Solwayo Ngwenya recently said the closure of schools might have sparked an
increase in cases in the country and warned that the current wave was spreading
faster.
“This current wave was predicted and was mainly caused by
the closure of schools. Schools have been super-spreaders of the virus and I
suspect when schools closed, a lot of infections came into the communities,” he
said.
“Generally, children are not very sick and probably they
have been carrying the virus around and now it’s all over. We could also be
having a lot of variants coming from countries such as Brazil, the United
Kingdom, India and South Africa.”
Ngwenya said these variants were highly transmissible. “These
variants are different from the first and second wave. One person can infect a
lot of people and the infections will continue to rise,” he said.
“These areas have been identified as hotspots, but I
suspect COVID-19 is all over the place and not in one place. It’s a matter of
testing more people. If we test more people, you will find COVID-19 all over
the place.
“The hotspots show that it will even spread more from those
areas further to other areas that are not yet hotspots.”
Government this week announced that Masvingo, Chiredzi,
Nkulumane, Emakhandeni and Bulawayo’s northern suburbs were now COVID-19
hotspots. Newsday
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