By Simon Deng
At least 1.2 million people have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 across the country since the start of the vaccination campaign in early 2020.
Malick Gai, the information management officer for the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) revealed on Sunday in Juba.
“We have received over 2 million doses of vaccines and we have managed to reach about 1.2 million people who are fully vaccinated currently, and of this 52 percent are females and 48 percent are males,” Gai told journalists during the weekly press briefing on COVID-19.
“We are seeing an increment on the female category who are actually fully vaccinated, we have vaccinated 13 percent of people with comorbidities and we have managed to reach about 9 percent of the country’s population,” he said.
South Sudan’s population estimate is at 12.2 million people currently.
Gai revealed that over 4.5 million new confirmed COVID-19 cases have been recently registered worldwide.
Adding that this includes 9,000 new deaths due to COVID-19 bringing the cumulative global number of cases to 544 million and over six million deaths respectively.
He added that the number of admissions in intensive care unit across hospitals and deaths have however remained low, including in countries reporting COVID-19 upsurges.
Bior Kuer Bior, the Manager for the Public Health Emergency Operation Centre, said that the trend of COVID-19 in South Sudan is declining despite upsurge in other countries.
“We have not deployed GeneXpert, there are plans to put GeneXpert to Pibor we are relying on partners. Otherwise COVID-19 cases in South Sudan are going down while the cases across the globe are going up,” Kuer said.
Abraham Ajok, the Data Manager for the Public Health Laboratory Emergency Operation Center, said that they last recorded rise in COVID-19 cases in March this year.
“in March we had some uptick in COVID-19 cases but since then we realized that there is decline in the number of cases,”Ajok said.
