COVID-19 UPDATE: Number of positive cases has reduced but let us continue being cautious, says Dr. Aman.

Dr. Aman on Thursday noted that the number of new positive cases in Africa had reduced, but urged Kenyans to continue being cautious, ”It is true that the positivity rate seems to be coming down. But we must treat this with caution and the reason why the WHO insists that we must maintain a level of 5% positivity rate for at least two weeks is because you need time to be sure that the flattening of the curve is real and not something created by bottlenecks in our testing or sampling systems,” said the CAS. ”We will have to continue observing the trend of this positivity rate but the indication is promising because we are seeing several of the counties are experiencing more or less the same trend.” The CAS was speaking at Afya House during the daily situational briefing on Covid-19 in the country.

Dr. Aman also intimated that there was an accelerated global effort to try and develop a vaccine against the disease and that vaccines from different countries were at different stages. ”Very soon, there will be a number of candidates available for use once they vaccines have been licensed. We must once again position ourselves as a country to be able to access these vaccines once they are available. As far as developing countries are concerned, this is being addressed through discussions with the Global Vaccine Initiative (VCI) to see how the said countries will access the vaccines.

KEMRI is currently involved in the Oxford vaccine trial hence the Ministry of Health showed optimism that once the trials were successful, the country would be one of the beneficiaries once the vaccines become available. Dr. Aman also revealed that the Ministry was also exploring traditional herbs and plants which have been proven to be effective against other viruses like herpes to see whether they would be effective against Covid-19.

373 more people have tested positive for Covid-19 in the country, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 33,389. Speaking during the daily situational briefing on Covid-19 in the country, Health CAS Dr. Rashid Aman revealed that the new cases were confirmed positive from a sample of 4,663 tested in the last 24 hours.

72 patients have recovered from the disease, 36 from the Home-Based Care program, and 36 have been discharged from various hospitals. The total number of recoveries now stands at 19,368. 3 patients have succumbed to the disease, bringing the fatality to 567.