My last update on this was in November and things looked very different back then. COVID had not taken hold in Mozambique and things were opening up. At Christmas, we managed to get my parents over here and South Africans were flooding over the border to Mozambique’s beach resorts.
However once the new year came like a hangover after the party, the numbers started to rise and rise quickly. Zoe and Mum both got a flu-like bug which was a worry, but they both had negative COVID tests. The numbers here are not the most reliable. I take them to give an indicative picture of what is happening in the country. Not an absolute number. My understanding is that the country has the capacity to process 3000 tests a day and so that is how many are done. Previously they were struggling to find 3000 people to test. This is not the case now. It seems that people only get tests if they have very clear symptoms, or they pay for it.
Positive tests in January were up to roughly 1000 a day. That’s about a third of everyone tested having the disease. More than that in Maputo. That is where the disease seems to have taken hold and where most of the tests are done. The rest of the country is probably still quite clear of COVID we think. But data and news are not that easy to come by. A serious terrorist problem in the far north and a severe lack of infrastructure doesn’t help with this.
The ex-pat community in Maputo is quite small and so as numbers were rising, friends of friends were getting the disease. Our Scuba instructor and his family caught it, but luckily all recovered without incident.
The rise in numbers has had knock-on effects for us and the country. After months of rolling back restrictions, the president reinstated some of them. Beaches are now closed, social gatherings are banned and leisure activities are not allowed. We now also have a curfew at night. However, restaurants are open, so what counts as a leisure activity is totally unclear.
School has gone fully online for the children. As school restarted after the Christmas holidays, the children were due to go to school 4 days a week. They went in on the Monday of their first four day week. By Tuesday they were back online with only one day a week in school. A couple of weeks later the president announced the new restrictions and all schools (with some exceptions for children taking exams) have had to close across the country. This means Harriett and Imogen have been doing online school, apart from the odd day in, since April. Their school has now set some clear expectations in terms of numbers of what it requires before it will open up more than one day a week again.
We have changed what we do day to day. Zoe is going in to work less and doing more work from home. We are making use of all of the home delivery services available as the supermarket is probably one of the few places we spend time close to people indoors, so if we can avoid it, all the better. It does mean we don’t actually leave the condominium that much at the moment, apart from to walk the dog (which now can’t happen on the beach).
This is also the week when we have found out that we are now effectively locked out of our own country. Quarantine has been in place coming into the UK for a long time now and that seems a sensible precaution. It hasn’t always been followed so some better measures to ensure it is followed would probably be a good idea. But, now we have enforced government quarantine in a hotel for 10 days. It looks like it will be seven to eight thousand pounds for the four of us to be locked in one or two hotel bedrooms for ten days. No going out, just given three meals a day, tea, coffee and water. That pretty much rules out us being able to go back and visit the UK due to the time and cost involved. Well, that and the fact we are not keen on being thrown in a prison for ten days.
The numbers do seem to be starting to drop in Maputo. It’s not clear from the data yet, it’s a slight dip. The numbers in South Africa have drastically dropped and hopefully, we are heading down that path too. As for vaccines, that’s a long way off. It’s not the sort of thing Mozambique can afford. I understand it’s been promised enough to vaccinate about 20% of the population that will arrive by the winter (UK summer).