In 2020, as COVID-19 spread worldwide, prestigious entities published faulty predictions about the level of dissemination, especially when describing African countries and others with “weak healthcare systems.” How could the best fall so short, even when using well-known epidemiological variables to predict the behavior of a hygiene-related malady? It might have been due to insufficient data since COVID-19 was a novelty, still poorly understood. The current study aimed to analyze how two variables –population density and percentage of people with access to improved sanitation –affected the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Mozambique by February 2021, almost one year since the first case in the country.

All data were publicly available:

population density in Census 2017, access to sanitation in the Mozambique Public Expenditure Review 2014, and the number of COVID-19 cases in the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 daily bulletin (no. 332). JASP 0.13.1.0 allowed correlating all variables, and MicrosoftExcel™ was chosen to perform fitting analysis to model the algebraic relationship between the number of cases and the other variables. The cases showed a positive correlation (r = 0.663) with density, and their relationship was consistent with a cubic function. Sanitation coverage also showed a positive correlation (r = 0.679), but the most straightforward algebraic representation was a quadratic function. The impact of population density on the number of COVID-19 cases was intuitive, but the logic points towards the highest number of cases where sanitation facilities lacked the most. Thus, the influence of other factors outweighed the effect of sanitation, or people tend to be careless before the sense of security where the sanitation is better. Nevertheless, these findings can support predictions and decision-making, and the population needs to abide by the Government’s recommendations.