A new scientific study revealed on Wednesday that restricting movement and closing borders has slowed down the entry into Mozambique of covid-19 variants from abroad, but has not been effective in stopping those from neighboring countries.

Mariana López, a researcher at the Instituto de Bio-medicina de Valencia (IBV) in Spain, believes that "restrictions on movement and the closing of borders have probably prevented or largely delayed the introduction of variants from non-African countries, but they have been insufficient to prevent the entry of the virus from neighboring countries".

According to the publication of the aforementioned study, the work was based on samples taken in southern Mozambique, led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, in collaboration with the Manhiça Health Research Center (CISM), Maputo province, and the IBV.

According to the scientists, even though "only a fraction of the introductions [in the country] contributed to the local spread of the virus".

"These results raise questions about the cost-benefit ratio of such measures in a context of porous borders, as is the case in Mozambique," reads the study's abstract, quoted by Lusa.

"We can conclude that covid-19 was transmitted in Mozambique through regional migrations (for the beta variant) and international migrations (for the delta variant)," explains Inácio Mandomando, coordinator of the area of bacterial, viral and other neglected tropical diseases at CISM.

The results indicate that the vast majority of the almost 1,000 sequences from Mozambique analyzed in this study corresponded to the delta variant (which dominated in the third wave, between June and September 2021), followed by beta (which dominated in the second wave, between January and March 2021).