Egypt may extend night-time curfew for more15 days: official

CAIRO - 4 May 2020: Egypt would extend the night-time curfew for another 15 days until the end of the holy month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic Calendar when Muslims worldwide fast from dusk to dawn, officials at the cabinet told Youm7 on Sunday.

The hours of the curfew will be kept unchanged as it starts from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am, the official added on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to brief the media.

This decision of expanding the curfew will be announced after the cabinet’s weekly meeting.

As for the three-day Eid al-Fitr festival, the curfew hours will be determined on the development of the situation of the Covid-19, he said.

On April 23, 2020, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli announced that the night-time curfew hours were shortened to start from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am during the holy month of Ramadan.

Madbouli added that the commercial centers are allowed to open over the whole week until 5:00 pm.

The Prime Minister announced that the state and the Egyptians have to cope with COVID-19 impacts via precautionary measures as the disease could exist for a long time.

Egypt registered on Sunday 348 new coronavirus (COVID-19) cases and 7 deaths over the last 24 hours, raising the total infected patients to 6,813 and the mortality to 436 deaths, according to the Health Minister’s daily briefing.

New 70 patients were discharged from the hospital after being confirmed that they are completely recovered from the viruses, bringing the number of recovered cases to 1,632 out of 2,139 who had been retested for the virus and had received negative results.

The current COVID-19 mortality rate in Egypt is 6.6 percent, according to the Health Ministry’s official figures on Sunday, after a total of 429 cases have officially died of the novel virus, while deaths worldwide almost reached 250,000.

In mid-April, the official death rate in Egypt, according to daily figures, reached 7.5%.

The recovered cases, according to the figures, represent 24.1 people per 100, while the number of those whose test results turned from positive to negative is 2,041, representing 31.5 percent.

The Health Ministry did not confirm any case that caught the virus twice, an official at the ministry told Egypt Today, affirming that all recoveries left hospitals and have never come back for treatment.