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COVID-19: Refugee Camp Spurs Spike in New Cases

by Daniel Sabiiti
3:27 am

Mahama Refugee Camp in Kirehe District which hosts about 60,000 Burundian refugees has registered a number of COVID-19 cases.

Rwanda has this Friday registered a slightly increased number of New Coronavirus cases after new cases continue to rise in the refugee camp in the Eastern part of the country.

After days of registered few cases since Monday, with an average of 5 cases, the numbers went up again on Friday, with 35 new cases recorded.

27 of the new cases were recorded in the Kirehe district-based camp recording 27 while Kigali had only four cases, Nyagatare 3, and Burera 1 case.

The COVID-19 daily update provided by the Ministry of Health showed that the new cases were recorded in Mahama camp, which is hosting Burundian refuge, in Kirehe district in Eastern Province.

The camp has over 60,000 Burundian refugees with most of them already integrated into the communities, despite an existing UN-Rwanda government led program to have all the Burundian refugees freely and safely repatriated home.

Similarly, high figures coming from the Burundian refugee camp were recorded on October 19th and 21st which come out with 10 and 13 news cases respectively.

This has risen the test positivity rate from 0.2% on October 18 to 1.7%

A similar trend has almost been similar to the previous week which also recorded clusters of new cases in the Congolese refugee camps in Karongi district.

Despite the reopening of all public transport services across the country, Kigali has maintained a stable hand on containing the virus at below ten new cases, a situation that has been partly attributed to citizens adhering to preventive measures especially the mandatory wearing of face masks in public places.

Also, on a positive note, though Rwanda has registered 34 Covid-19 related deaths, the numbers test has hit above 540,000 as the government also embarks on conducting random tests with Kigali city.

The total number of cases in Rwanda is 5,062 but out of those 4,806, or 95% have recovered while active cases are 212.

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