Two more Kenyans who have been in treatment for coronavirus have fully recovered, Chief Administrative Secretary (CAS) in the Ministry of Health Dr Mercy Mwangangi has said.
This puts the total number of patients who have recovered from the life-threatening disease at 9.
However, seven more people tested positive for the disease. This means Kenya has a total of 179 COVID-19 patients under its care. 49 of these patients are aged between 16 and 29 years.
The seven were out of 305 tested by the government in the last 24 hours. The seven patients who are all Kenyans had either travelled from Congo or the US.
Two of them were in quarantine facilities while the other five were contact-traced by government’s surveillance teams.
Of the new cases, Nairobi still accounts for a huge number with five patients while Mombasa and Uasin Gishu had one case each.
Those under the government’s monitoring are 578 out of 2,004.
The government said it will hire an additional 500 doctors to help in tacking the pandemic and also asked private facilities carrying out COVID-19 tests to share results with MOH for close monitoring.
Meanwhile, the government has issued a 24-hour ultimatum to families whose kin died of coronavirus and their bodies are still lying in the morgue.
Chief government pathologist Dr Johansen Oduor said the State will bury the bodies as soon as the ultimatum lapses to avoid a scenario where they become infectious.
“To avoid a situation where we have so many bodies lying in the mortuary and these are bodies that are potentially infectious we came to that decision of having that directive that bodies be buried within 24 hours of death,” Dr Odour said.
“This is part of the measures the government has put in place to ensure mortuaries are not congested with bodies that are potentially infectious.”
He said that the state will aid the families to transport the body to the burial site.
