S. Sudan surrounded by African nations with soaring covid cases, only 3% of its population could be vaccinated by next month

South Sudan with a population of about 11million and the number of vaccines available is about 132,000 doses, and that’s targeting about three percent of the ­population. All the countries around are on the red list and Uganda especially is seeing a big surge in Covid cases.

Recently, the National Ministry of Health mentioned that it will complete the first phase of the COVID-19 vaccination program in the next three weeks. The ministry added that up to 45,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been dispatched to centers across the country since the vaccination exercise started on the 6th of April.

The Director-General for Preventive Health Services and the Acting Incident manager for COVID-19 Dr. John Romunu says the aim is to ensure all doses have been administered before the consignment expires mid-July. But the whole idea of the ministry now is to get things up and running because the ministry doesn’t want to get vaccines that have expired to the people, so trying to put a system in place.

What about monitoring systems? There is no enough data about COVID-19 cases in the country. The numbers are not coming out. Though no record of a surge in cases, could that be because the monitoring systems are very weak?

Though, it’s not just vaccines. There’s a whole system that has to be in place. There has to be a cold chain to get the vaccines out there.