Experts decry low uptake of Covid-19 jabs

By Simon Deng

Only 1.5 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated in South Sudan.

Sacha Bootsma, the Covid-19 Incident Manager for the World Health Organization said the vaccination is key to boosting immunity besides social measures such as wearing facemask and social distancing.

“We have 200,077 people fully vaccinated that is now 1.5 percent of the total population, so steady but slow increase, we now have 156,148 people with single shot Johnson and Johnson,” said Bootsma.

He revealed that the vaccination drive targets 1.3 million people across the country.

An additional 295,000 doses of Johnson and Johnson vaccines from the government of Norway and New Zealand is expected to arrive in the coming weeks, Bootsma said.

“We are not doing the testing here in the country, so we cannot test every samples to know the actually number of cases of omicron in the country,” Bootsma said.

According to data from the Public Health Emergency Operation Centre, South Sudan reported 61 new Coronavirus infections within the last 24 hours.

This pushes the overall tally of Covid-19 to 16,210 infected persons, 12,934 recoveries and 136 cumulative deaths. 

John Rumunu, the acting Incident Manager for Covid-19 in the country said the government and health partners should establish a laboratory testing capacity for genomic sequencing in the country.