431 test positive for Covid-19 as positivity rate now at 7.4 per cent

Health CS Mutahi Kagwe in Nairobi on April 21, 2021. [Boniface Okendo, Standard]

Kenya has in the last 24 hours recorded 431 positive Covid-19 cases, pushing the national tally to 169,356.

The 410 Kenyans and 21 foreigners were from a sample size of 5,846.

The country's positivity rate in the last 24 hours stands at 7.4 per cent.

Nairobi county led in the new cases after recording 111 cases. In terms of age, the youngest who tested positive was four months old and the oldest was 90.

Men who tested positive for Covid-19 in Kenya in the last 24 hours numbered 248 against 183 women.

Kisumu county reported 67 cases as Siaya followed with 55, Mombasa 38, among others.

Some 31 patients recovered from coronavirus, pushing the recoveries to 115844.

However, 10 people died of Covid-19 under the same period, pushing the national fatalities to 3,097.

There are 1,103 patients currently admitted in hospitals countrywide, Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said in a statement to newsrooms on Wednesday.

"As of today, 960,379 have so far been vaccinated," CS Kagwe said.

Meanwhile, Reuters has reported that official death tolls from the Covid-19 pandemic are likely to be a "significant undercount", the World Health Organization said on Friday, estimating that the true figure of direct and indirect deaths could be two to three times higher.

Presenting its annual World Health Statistics report, the WHO estimated that total deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 were at least 3 million or 1.2 million more than 1.8 million figure officially reported.

"We are likely facing a significant undercount of total deaths directly and indirectly attributed to Covid-19," the U.N. agency said.

By May 20, 2021, WHO statistics showed around 3.4 million people had died globally as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, although the real figure could be much higher, the WHO said.

With the rising death toll in Latin America and in Asia as new variants spread, the death toll "would truly be two to three times higher," said Samira Asma, WHO's Assistant Director-General in its data and analytics division.

"So I think safely about 6 to 8 million deaths could be an estimate on a cautionary note," Asma told a virtual press briefing.

The WHO cited the lack of reliable systems to log deaths in many countries, while in many cases people had died from Covid-19 before they had been tested for the virus.