Kenya records 604 new Covid-19 cases

Kenya has recorded 604 new Covid-19 cases from 5,832 samples tested in the past 24 hours. This raises the national infections tally to 42,541.

In a statement issued on Wednesday afternoon, Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe also said that 88 more patients have recovered from virus over the same period. This brings the total number of recoveries in Kenya to 31,428.

At the same time, 10 more patients succumbed to the disease, raising Kenya’s death toll to 797.

The Health ministry made the announcement even as a new research revealed that children are super spreaders of Covid-19.

A study of more than half a million people exposed to the virus in India established that the role of children in the transmission of the disease may have been underestimated.

The research published on the journal Science reported children are “potentially much more important to transmitting the virus, especially within households, than previous studies have identified.”

“Kids are very efficient transmitters in this setting (household), which is something that hasn’t been firmly established in previous studies,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, the lead researcher.

Scientists from Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, traced infection pathways and mortality of 575,071 who had been exposed to Covid-19 from 84,965 confirmed cases in India.

They found that reported cases of Covid-19 and deaths have been more concentrated in younger people in India than they expected, basing their observation on higher-income countries.