MIRI – Sarawak will start administering Covid-19 vaccines for those between the ages of 15 and 17 this coming week, said state Disaster Management Committee adviser Datuk Dr Sim Kui Hian, adding that the drive is being prepared now.
He stressed that there is a need to vaccinate as many people as possible and seeing that most of Sarawak’s adult population have been vaccinated, it is now time to focus on teenagers.
“Next week, we will start vaccination for those aged 15 to 17,” he said in a Facebook post today.
Dr Sim, who is also the state housing and local government minister, said the swift surge of infections in the state capital Kuching is reflective of the pattern of infections involving the highly transmissible Delta variant.
Currently, efforts are being made to prepare an extra 1,000 beds for the Sarawak General Hospital as well as low-risks treatment centres in Kuching. The city saw an extra 1,601 new cases yesterday.
At the moment, a 10pm to 5am curfew has been imposed in Sarawak’s capital as well as Bau, Lundu, Serian, Samarahan, Tebedu, Simunjan and Asajaya districts.
A couple of days ago, Parti Sarawak Bersatu supreme council member See Chee How had pointed out that there are 240,000 Sarawakian teens aged between 12 and 17 who must be vaccinated against Covid-19 now, as the Delta variant is getting more ferocious by the week.
The Batu Lintang assemblyman said that the state government cannot afford to wait for federal authorities to give the green light to vaccinate teens.
“The Sarawak government must demand from the federal side the necessary stocks of vaccines for the 240,000 teens in this state aged 12 to 17. Once we have the vaccine stocks, we in Sarawak must roll out the vaccination drive without any more delay.
“The research team from Unimas (Universiti Malaysia Sarawak) have already given much data pointing to the fact that the Delta variant is spreading very fast. Even those adults fully vaccinated with two doses are getting infected, what more to say the young kids, who are not vaccinated as yet.
“There is data from the state Health Department that the positivity rate is getting higher in Kuching and other parts of the state too. This could be due to the Delta variant,” he said in a press statement.
Sarawak is seeing a sharp spike of the Delta variant cases and Unimas, the agency tasked with carrying out genomic testing by the state Disaster Management Committee, has found that 73% of all positive cases subjected to genomic testing on August 10 had turned out to be the Delta variant.
It submitted a report to the committee via director of Unimas Institute of Health and Community Medicine Dr David Perera.
In the Kuching Division alone, the Delta variant detection rate is about 90% of the cases we tested. The Delta variant was also found in the districts of Bau, Lundu, Samarahan, Simunjan, Sibu, Miri and Bintulu.
“On August 10, out of the 249 cases of variants detected, 248 are Delta variant and one was (the so-called) Indonesian variant of concern,” Dr Perera had said in his report.
A week earlier on August 3, another 180 cases of Delta Covid-19 variant were uncovered by Unimas in Sarawak, plus another of the new Indonesian variant of concern.
Tests on August 3 also found two more Beta variant cases and seven cases of the new Indonesian variant of concern. Unimas had also found that Sarawak had more than 700 mutated variants, meaning it has the most mutated variants of any state in the country.
In second place is Selangor with 31 Delta variant cases as of last week. Sarawak has seen nearly 500 Covid-19 deaths with a cumulative caseload of 92,000 so far. – The Vibes, August 21, 2021
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