BLANTYRE-(MaraviPost)—Malawi has for the past 24 hours recorded six confirmed coronavirus in Lilongwe, raising the total to 23, health ministry Principal Secretary Dr. Dan Namalika has said.
The five cases are all from Lilongwe.
Namalika says Ministry of Health is tracing the contacts of all the new patients.
“The major concern is that these new cases are coming from high density areas,” he said.
The six new cases comes barely few days after High Court Judge Kenyata Nyirenda granted the Human Rights Defenders Coalition (HRDC) an injunction restraining government to implement lockdown as a measure to contain the novel coronavirus.
HRDC and opposition parties faulted the DPP-led government for failing to announce any tangible measures to alleviate pain of millions of poor Malawians during the lockdown.
Reacting, Minister of Information, Civic Education and Communications Technology, Mark Botomani, had warned that the injunction has placed Malawian lives at risk of the pandemic.
“We have received the information with a lot of misgivings. To begin with, we did not expect that in prevailing circumstances we have a judge granting such kind of an injunction.
“You see, the very reason that government decided to lockdown the country from tomorrow (today) is basically to protect the lives of people because right now we no longer have these imported cases of coronavirus. What we have now is a local transmission,” said Botomani in an interview with BBC Africa, monitored by Maravi Post last week.
