HEALTH Minister Dr Chitalu Chilufya says the country has recorded 74 new cases of COVID-19 out of the 882 tests conducted in the last 24 hours.

Speaking during his daily COVID-19 updates, Sunday, Dr Chilufya announced that only eight of these cases were from Nakonde.

“In the last 24 hours, we did carry out 882 tests and out of these, we have confirmed 74 new COVID-19 cases and these cases are coming from the contacts of those that we have already identified as positives, the alerts that you the community continue to give us and the routine surveillance in our health facilities and communities where we are doing mass screening and testing. And to look at the specific areas where these cases are coming from, if we look at the University Teaching Hospital we carried out 618 tests and out of these, 66 cases were picked and the tests at UTH again covered contacts alerts and those as part of the routine surveillance. So eight came from Nakonde, 24 from Chilanga and 34 from various parts of Lusaka including Emmasdale, Lusaka West, parts of Rhodes Park and also parts of Chawama,” Dr Chilufya said.

“Eight of the 179 tests that were carried  out at TDRC in Ndola were positives and these had one contact in Kitwe and two in Ndola and five in Kabwe. There are some samples from Nakonde that have been shipped to the UTH virology laboratory for testing while some were being done at Chinsali.”

Dr Chilufya announced that the number of recoveries had risen to 188.

“Today, we have also recorded five discharges two from Levy and three from Kitwe general hospital. All the other patients in the isolation facilities remain stable therefore the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases in Zambia now stands at 753 and the death remains static at seven and the discharges have increased by five to 188. Under our care, we have 558 cases and these are being managed in our various facilities and remain stable,” he said.

He said 2,000 cases had been declared as non-cases after alerts from members of the public.

“The quarantine people who remain under our radar, we have 4,270 that have been discharged out of the quarantine period   and further our response teams have declared 2,016 cases as non-cases after alerts from the community,” he said.

Dr Chilufya said  Africa had now recorded over 83,000 cases.

“At a global level we have 4,722,233 cases of COVID-19 with 313,266 deaths we have on a positive note recorded as recoveries 1, 813,20. In Africa, our numbers have now reached 83,235 while our deaths toll stands at 2,726 recoveries are at 32,107. The Africa CDC we have recorded in total 15,553 cases, and we have lost 280 citizens while 6,864 have recovered. The SADC region has 14 countries and they are eight that immediately surround Zambia and we are keeping a watchful eye on those that surround Zambia. And so far, we have seen that amongst those countries, 2,290 cases have been recorded while 92 deaths have been noted and 584 have recovered,” said Dr Chilufya.

And Dr Chilufya said investigations into the death of 24-year-old Ian Muntambo were still ongoing.

Meanwhile, Indian High Commissioner to Zambia Ngulkam Jathom Gangte donated 100,000 tablets of hydroxychloroquine and paracetamol tablets.