The number of Covid-19 infections in Kenya has passed 300 mark after seven additional cases were confirmed on Wednesday.
The seven new cases are from 707 samples tested in the last 24 hours and raise the tally of Covid-19 infections in the country to 303, Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe said in an update on Wednesday.
Out of the seven cases, six were registered in Mombasa County while one is from Nairobi. All the new patients are Kenyan nationals aged between 21 and 61 years and none has a recent history of travel.
Six of the cases are from targeted mass testing and one was picked by the ministry’s surveillance teams. Five are male while two are female.
Nine more patients have also fully recovered, bringing the total of recoveries to 83 while the death toll remains 14. So far a total of 15,124 samples have been tested.
CS Kagwe said the ministry has distributed 25,000 testing kits across the country ahead of mass testing for Covid-19. He said they are targeting to test 250,000 samples by the end of June.
At the same time, CS Kagwe announced that Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i has declared the cessation of movement into and out of Mandera County following an increase in community infections.
Mandera joins five other regions that have been placed under travel restriction to contain the spread of the bug. The others are Nairobi metropolitan area, Mombasa, Kwale and Kilifi counties.
Mandera, a northern Kenya county which borders Somalia and Ethiopia, has recorded eight cases of Covid-19 in the past two weeks.
