NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 28 – Kenya’s Health Ministry said 99 new COVID-19 cases were detected Friday raising the caseload in the country to 100,422.
Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe said the cases were detected from 4,758 samples.
There were two deaths which raised fatalities in the country to 1,753.
Kagwe said 66 patients recovered from the disease including 32 from home-based care programs and 34 from various hospitals raising recoveries in the country to 83,757.
Kenya’s COVID-19 infections have been declining, with an average of 2.5 percent positivity rate maintained in the last two months.
Schools have since fully reopened and no serious cases have been reported by the Ministry of Education.
According to the World Health Organization, a country will have flattened the COVID-19 curve if a 5 percent positivity rate is sustained for 14 days.
Kenya’s COVID-19 containment measures such as social distancing, wearing of masks and dusk to dawn curfew are still in place, with most Kenyans anticipating that the economy will fully reopen due to the declining number of infections.
Kenya is yet to record the new COVID-19 variant which has been reported in the UK, US and South Africa which orchestrated stricter lockdown measures in those nations.
But even as the curve showed signs of flattening, the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) has warned of a possible surge of cases from March following the reopening of schools this month.
Kagwe said the government has already ordered doses of the COVID-19 vaccine that will initially target medical staff, police officers and others in the critical areas before distribution to other classes of people on a voluntary basis.
KEMRI has projected that following the full-scale school reopening, there will be about 13.7 thousand new COVID-19 cases and nearly 116 new deaths by June.