Covid-19: The deadly race between variants and vaccines

 

[Courtesy]

For much of the last fortnight, Kenyans were engrossed by exhilarating action from the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games where our athletes were gunning for gold, silver and bronze medals. But there was a different, separate race back home: that of variants against vaccines.

Kenya, like the rest of Africa, is said to be in the deadliest stage of the pandemic: total fatality ratio in Africa is at 2.5 per cent with Kenya’s death toll rising daily on the face of a race to vaccinate 10 million people before end of the year.

The Ministry of Health has launched campaigns to vaccinate the laggards with an average of almost 10,000 jabs administered per day. Only after the beginning of the mass vaccination did the country record a high of 25,000 in a day.

So far, slightly more than 1.8 million people have been vaccinated and to hit the 10 million mark, more than eight million have to get the jab in the next four months, or 144 days.

This translates to vaccinating at least 57,000 people per day, more than five times the current capacity. Indeed, if all 622 identified facilities had vaccines, about 150,000 people could be vaccinated daily and that way, about two to three million people would receive the jab in a month.

That would be remarkable considering it took more than four months for Kenya to finish the first batch of more than a million Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs.

As Kenya tries to get its vaccination numbers right, the coronavirus continues its mutation race, with the delta variant now said to have mutated to a “Delta Plus Variant”.

The Ministry of Health's daily Covid-19 report on August 8 from shows the pandemic is taking a toll on young people. Some 33 people aged 0-9 years were positive, 46 people aged 10-19 and 146 people aged between 20-29 had Covid 19.

This has been attributed to the more dominant Delta variant whose increased transmissibility only exacerbates the divide between those vaccinated and those not.

But Dr Willis Akhwale, the head of Vaccines Taskforce explains that in the initial three weeks of the vaccination, only one facility per county was being used “but now we have enough doses and we are increasing our communication campaigns and we will be doing outreaches and increasing vaccination centres.”

When the vaccination programme was rolled out, Kenya had a plan to administer the vaccines in three phases. In the first phase, 1.2 million were to be vaccinated between February and June this year. The target was front line health workers and those working in health facilities. The vaccination programme did not start as planned. It started in March.

In the second phase, 9.7 million Kenyans above 50 years were to be vaccinated between June and July.

The third phase hoped to vaccinate 4.9 million people who would include all other vulnerable groups depending on the availability of the vaccines.

This plan seemed to have changed, with all the priority groups vaccinated in the first phase, but up to now less than three per cent of Kenyans have been vaccinated, yet according to scientists, the vaccinated are safer despite the variants because even if they get Covid-19, it is likely to be less severe.

Dr Akhwale says: “We want to vaccinate as many people as possible and as quickly as possible. The more people we vaccinate the safer the world would be for everybody.”

He reckons that the pandemic remains unpredictable even in the US. Despite most of its population having been vaccinated, their curve is going up and "with such an unpredictable environment, vaccines becomes the best tool.”