NAIROBI, Kenya, Jun 27 – The COVID-19 positivity rate in the county declined to 7.6 per cent on Saturday after 508 people tested positive from a sample size of 6,664, raising cumulative cases documented since March 2020 to 182,393.
Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe said 1,037 patients were admitted in various hospitals across the country, among them 101 in the Intensive Care Unit.
The CS also announced that 18 coronavirus-triggered deaths had been recorded, all of them being late deaths reported after conducting facility record audits on diverse dates in the months of March, April and June.
Total fatalities stood at 3,574.
Another 539 patients were discharged after recovering bringing total recoveries to 124,392.
The Ministry reported 1,279,023 people had so far been vaccinated against the virus including 277,312 who had received their second jab.
Kenya has barely made progress towards attaining herd immunity, the only hope to contain and defeat COVID-19, with statistics from the Ministry of Health indicating only 1 percent of the adult population had been fully vaccinated.
Although the World Health Organization (WHO) has not indicated the specific proportion of the population that must be vaccinated against COVID-19 to begin inducing herd immunity, developed nations have adopted targets above 70 per cent.
The United States of America and China set 70 per cent and 80 per cent targets to help their populations and economies cope with the pandemic.
“To safely achieve herd immunity against COVID-19, a substantial proportion of a population would need to be vaccinated, lowering the overall amount of virus able to spread in the whole population. One of the aims with working towards herd immunity is to keep vulnerable groups who cannot get vaccinated,” an advisory by WHO indicates.
The country expects to receive an undisclosed number of doses of the Pfizer vaccine from the United States government by the end of June 2021.
The majority of African countries received their vaccines under the Covax scheme, and they were largely sourced from the Serum Institute of India.
When India stopped vaccine exports in response to its own urgent needs, manufacturers faced challenges in hastening production.
WHO had indicated in its projections that Africa needed 200 million doses to vaccinate 10 per cent of its population by September 2021.
