Most of the 152 Kenyans who have so far died with confirmed Covid-19 positivity were people with hypertension or diabetes.
This was stated by Kenyan Chief Administrative Secretary of Health Rashid Abdi Aman during the customary daily press conference updating national pandemic data on Thursday, July 2 at Afya House in Nairobi.
Confirming 268 new cases in the country in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of positives recorded to 6491, Abdi Aman revealed that the infections were detected by 2704 swabs, bringing the number of tests performed so far to 176,659.
Of the new cases, 259 are Kenyan and nine are foreign. 160 of the positive cases are male and 108 are female. The age of the new cases varies from one year to 80.
It was also announced that 20 patients were discharged from hospitals, bringing the total number of healings from Covid-19 to 2,109.
There are three confirmed deaths, bringing the total number of deaths with the virus to 152.
Nairobi County, as often happens, is leading with 175 cases, followed by Mombasa 28 (of which 15 are students who recently returned from South Sudan on a special flight), Busia 18, Kiambu 11, Kajiado and Migori 9, Uasin Gishu 8, Machakos 6, Narok 2, Makueni and Muranga 1.
Returning to hypertension, Abdi Aman recalled that in Kenya about six million people live with this problem, an important number, representing 24% of the population.
"It is estimated that 1.13 billion people worldwide live with this condition, which represents 31% of the adult population - Kenya Health Information System January-March 2020 data from 21 reporting counties on hypertension indicate that a total of 67,465 hypertensive patients have been seen and reported. We urge citizens to limit the amount of sugar, salt, alcohol, saturated fat and fattened meat and to avoid sugary drinks as much as possible.