Tanzania has recorded 100 new Covid-19 cases since the third wave of the viral disease broke out across the globe, President Samia Suluhu Hassan said on Monday.
Speaking during her maiden press conference at State House in Dar es Salaam, President Hassan said 70 of the 100 patients were in a critical condition.
Former President John Magufuli, who died on 18 March, had consistently downplayed the pandemic, relying on prayers to defeat the virus and declaring vaccines potentially “dangerous”.
The country has not published statistics on the epidemic since April 2020: the latest figures were 509 cases of infection and 16 deaths.
His successor, Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan, took the opposite view of his policy, saying that “it is not good to ignore it” (Covid-19).
“We cannot reject it or accept it without the findings of scientific research,” the president, who appears in public wearing a mask, said in early April, announcing the creation of a task force to advise her government on managing the pandemic
“About 70 are on ventilators,” she said.
It was the first time Tanzania had made Covid-19 statistics public since May 2020.
