Own Correspondent

In a sudden new turn, Zimbabwean Covid-19 figures are changing with recoveries shooting up while deaths and new cases are slowing down.

In the run up to the foiled July 31 planned protests, the country reported a sudden huge numbers of new cases and deaths most of which were discovered in postmortem reports.

The sudden huge rise in the new cases and deaths, at the time, got critics believing that goverment was cooking up figures to scare citizens out of the demonstration which government banned on health grounds because of the then rise in Covid-19 cases.

In the last week, the Ministry of Health and Child Care has been reporting a huge rise in recoveries with no explanation where the Ministry is getting it right. The figures have forced goverment to relax some stringent curfew measures rolled out few days before the July 31 foiled protests.

In the latest report from the Ministry of Health and Child Care, 257 new recoveries were recorded with 156 of those coming from Matabeleland South, with six new Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday 18 August 2020.

70 new cases were recorded, 63 of them local contact and seven from Botswana. 47 of the local contact cases those were in Harare.

In total, there have been 5,378 cumulative cases to date. Of the resolved cases, 11 have resulted in death while 4,105 have recovered.

That means Zimbabwe active Covid-19 cases continue to drop and now sit at 1,132.