PUTRAJAYA, April 28 — The government will be accelerating the Covid-19 vaccination programme in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, amid high Covid-19 incidence rates, Dr Adham Baba said today.
The health minister said that the capital city of Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, the country’s most developed state, are both important places where essential businesses and the economy cannot be shut down.
“Our approach is to accelerate vaccination for Selangor and Kuala Lumpur because by accelerating vaccination, we will achieve herd immunity earlier,” Dr Adham told a joint press conference with Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Khairy Jamaluddin on the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK) today.
“These areas are important whereby essential businesses and the economy cannot be closed and we also have to look at population density and the crowded mobilisation of people.”
Yesterday alone, Selangor reported 750 new Covid-19 cases, with a Covid-19 incidence rate of 11.4 per 100,000 population. Kuala Lumpur’s incidence rate yesterday was higher than Selangor at 21.3 per 100,000 population. Both incidence rates exceeded the nationwide rate of 8.4 per 100,000 population.
Selangor, whose population is the largest in Malaysia, has been reporting an average daily 705 new Covid-19 cases over the past week. Meanwhile, Kuala Lumpur has been reporting an average daily 288 cases over the past week.
Out of 56 sub-districts in Selangor, 24 are currently in the red zone with more than 40 new Covid-19 cases, while 89.7 per cent (26 sub-districts) in Kuala Lumpur are in the red zone, based on a 14-day moving average.
Selangor has vaccinated the highest number of individuals with both doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, translating to 1,103 fully vaccinated people per 100,000 population, while Kuala Lumpur has fully vaccinated 2,660 people per 100,000 population as of yesterday.
Khairy, during the press conference, also pointed out that since the beginning of Phase Two of PICK, Penang has managed to administer the highest number of doses (13,333 doses), followed by Pahang (14,812 doses), and Sarawak (11,893 doses).
“Phase Two started in stages with 30 vaccination centres (PPV) opened on April 19. As of today, we have already activated 60 PPVs in 12 states and more will be opened, ” Khairy said.
“By the end of May, a total of 129 PPVs will be operating throughout the country.”
The Covid-19 vaccine coordinating minister also announced that so far, Malaysia has received 1,938,660 vaccine doses and will be receiving 139,010 Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses between today and April 30.
Out of the 1,938,660 vaccine doses available, 70.7 per cent of the doses (1,369,749) have been administered.
Besides that, Khairy also announced that 1,500 media personnel will be vaccinated with the Covid-19 vaccine in May.
