Covid19 kills two more Ugandans, one of them aged 27

Dr Henry Mwebesa, the director general of health services at Uganda's health ministry. Courtesy Photo

Uganda’s Covid19 deaths have risen to nine after two more patients succumbed, the Ministry of Health (MoH) has announced in an August 10 statement.

One of the deceased was a 27-year-old. He is so far the youngest Ugandan to die of the deadly respiratory disease.

He was a male from Kyangwali Refugee Settlement and passed on at the Hoima Regional Referral Hospital.

The other was a 46-year-old male from Kampala who passed on at Nsambya Hospital. The deceased had symptoms consistent with Covid19, and tests later confirmed they had Coronavirus, MoH further noted.

The previous patient to succumb to Covid19 was a 49-year-old woman from Wakiso who was also HIV positive and was on medication.

MoH also revealed that the woman had other risk factors such as Tuberculosis and Asthma.

The woman had rushed to a local clinic for treatment after presenting with chest pain, high fever, difficulty in breathing and abdominal pain — signs and symptoms consistent with Covid19.

But health workers at the clinic had suspected that the woman could be having Covid19, prompting them to alert MoH through its helplines.

MoH teams would later come to draw samples from the woman, which returned positive results. Mwebesa further revealed that the woman had passed on August 09 morning at the clinic.

Almost all of Uganda’s Covid19 fatalities were undetected earlier: by the time MoH confirmed these patients were positive, it was already too late.

Meanwhile, results from tests done on August 09 confirmed 14 new Covid19 cases, bringing the cumulative number of confirmed cases of Ugandans to 1,297.

Nine of the new cases were contacts of previously confirmed cases from the Kampala Metropolitan Area; three were alerts while the rest were truck drivers.

The alerts included the deceased from Hoima, a patient from Ntungamo and another from the Kampala Metropolitan Area.