•On Sunday, Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe said the number of confirmed cases in the country now stand at 197 after six more cases were confirmed.
•The total number of people having recovered and discharged from hospital is now 25.
Image: FILE
Mortuary workers covered in white ghoulish hazmat suits threw the body of the latest coronavirus victim into a shallow grave at 3am on Sunday in Siaya.
Creepy video of the burial shows three mortuary workers arriving in a white pick-up in Kamalunga village, Simur Kondiek sublocation, and toss the body of the Kenya Ports Authority worker into a cold grave at dawn.
There are no mourners, but some women can be heard wailing.
Ugenya police station said the 59-year-old man identified as James Oyugi travelled from Mombasa with his wife and two daughters on Sunday, April 4.
He slept in Nairobi and the next day travelled to Kisumu, where he slept. He was involved in a non-injury accident at Awasi market.
He arrived in Ukwala on Tuesday using his brother's vehicle, and remained indoors since.
Police said last Friday at 10am he started coughing and was rushed to Matibabu Foundation Private Hospital. He died at 7pm.
"On April 11, 2020, blood specimens were taken to Kemri in Kisumu. The results were positive (for coronavirus)," a statement from Ugenya police station indicated.
Police ordered the body to be disinfected and buried on Sunday night in body bags.
All contacts have been rounded up and forced to quarantine at Siaya Isolation Centre.
Oyugi is among the eight people killed by coronavirus in Kenya to date.
On Sunday, Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said the number of confirmed cases in the country is 197, after six more people tested positive.
On a positive note, however, one more person was released from isolation after testing negative to Covid-19 after a series of tests.
The total number of people having recovered and discharged from hospital is now 25. Out of the six new positive cases, five are men while one is a woman. Five of them are Kenyan nationals while one is a foreign national.
Four of the cases are from Nairobi. Mombasa and Siaya each had one case.
“Two have a history of recent foreign travel from the Middle East, while one recently travelled from Mombasa. The six are aged between 25 and 59 years,” Health CS Kagwe said in a statement.
Five of the cases were picked from mandatory quarantine centres, while the sixth was picked by various surveillance teams. Contact tracing is ongoing.
A total of 2,160 contacts so far have been monitored, out of which 1,660 have been discharged after completing the 14 days follow-up period. Five hundred are on follow-up while the ministry has tested 7,447 samples since the first case was reported in the country on March 13.
“We thank all the Kenyans for their continued support and adherence to the Covid-19 mitigation measures that we have put in place. However, we also want to remind our citizens not to relent until we succeed in completely containing the spread of the virus in our country,” Kagwe said.
The ministry says at least 7,000 people will be tested for coronavirus in the coming weeks after the government received testing kits from Roche Diagnostics.
Director of Public Health Patrick Amoth on Saturday said the machines have been placed at various facilities.
“The beauty of what you're going to deploy is that now you're able to do more tests in a shorter time,” he said.
Mass testing will start in quarantine centres and for healthcare workers and thereafter across the different institutions.
Amoth explained that the Kobus 8,800 machine can do two to three-hour tests in about one hour.
The ministry, however, said mass testing will only face a setback considering the availability of testing kits based on global supply chain challenges.
The director assured that the ministry was putting efforts to procure more kits to utilise the machines to reach a bigger population.
“By testing, we shall be able to tell for sure where we are in terms of winning the battle,” he said.
The ministry acknowledged that so far, everything is according to its projection and has urged Kenyans to maintain personal hygiene, practice social distancing and stay at home if possible.
Last week, Health CAS Mercy Mwangangi announced that the ministry will roll out mass testing.
This was after reports that 17 Members of the National Assembly and Senate had tested positive for the virus.
Mwangangi said the private laboratories that tested the MPs had not relayed the information to the ministry.
She said by law all private facilities must now share their Covid-19 test results with the ministry.
Mwangangi also said as much the Public Health Act is invoked, the ministry is taking seriously matters of confidentiality and ensuring that those principles that are governed in medicine are still adhered to.