By Kwanta Douglas –
As part of the ongoing countrywide vaccination campaign, the Covid-19 vaccination has been narrowed down to the village and family levels. The aim is to help vulnerable people who cannot reach vaccination sites and educate those who are hesitant to take the vaccine.
Teams of youth volunteers, local leaders, and health professionals are now going door to door in all districts, administering the Covid-19 vaccine. The current campaign kicked off on January 16. It targets to vaccinate 1.5 million people before the end of January.
“Most of the people dying from the virus are the elderly in their 60s and 70s who are probably too weak to reach the vaccination sites. We have enough vaccines and capacity to reach them and that is our focus now,” said Dr Tharcisse Mpunga, the State Minister in Charge of Primary Health Care.
Five days into the campaign, 300,200 people had received their second dose. Vaccine doses administered in a day increased from an average of 20,000 to between 50,000 and 100,000 people vaccinated every day. As of January 20, 6.6 million people were fully vaccinated while over 736,000 people had received their booster shots.
Rwanda has seen a drop in Covid-19 infections that had reached a peak during the festive season. The drop is shared by other African countries as cases fell by 20 percent while notified deaths dropped by eight percent, according to the World Health Organization’s African regional office reports.