KOTA KINABALU: Sandakan’s vaccination rate has reached almost 100% following a door-to-door inoculation programme conducted by local authorities and health officials last week.
State Health Department director Datuk Dr Rose Nani Mudin said the Rapid Assessment and Vaccination Operation (Ravo) saw a total of 1,627 people vaccinated against Covid-19.
She said adults were given the single dose CanSino vaccine while teenagers were given Pfizer.
She said the programme in Sandakan, conducted from Oct 4-16, involved 68 locations and 39,000 people.
“We visited a total of 7,708 houses involving 39,548 people in Sandakan, out of which, 30,410 were those aged 12 and above,” Dr Rose said when contacted yesterday.
Following the Ravo programme, 30,215 or 99.36% of the eligible vaccinated people were inoculated, she said.
Sandakan was among the few districts with less than 60% vaccination rate before this.
Dr Rose said throughout the programme, they had to face challenges, especially with regard to geographical factors.
“Many of the areas covered are in rural places such as estates, remote areas, unstructured houses including squatter homes, so it took us longer to reach the people living in these areas,” she said.
Dr Rose added that during their visits, they discovered those unvaccinated were actually not huge, contrary to what the statistics showed because many, especially the non-citizens were no longer living in Sandakan.
She said the places or houses visited were those provided by local authorities, including local leaders.
Asked if anyone rejected or got worked up due to their door-to-door vaccination programme, she said there was none.
Dr Rose said the people they approached gave full cooperation.
Their next stop will be Tawau and Kalabakan starting today.
Meanwhile, Sabah recorded 504 new cases yesterday, the lowest since July 22 this year.
Sabah Covid-19 spokesperson Datuk Seri Masidi Manjun said the figure was down by 135 cases from 639 infections recorded the day before.
“A total of 15 districts saw a reduction in cases, eight registering an increase and four maintaining their numbers.
“Kota Kinabalu recorded the most at 60 cases while the rest of the districts all recorded infections below 50.
“There were also no new clusters reported today (yesterday),” said Masidi, who is also state Local Government and Housing Minister.
He added that even though the trend of daily cases looked favourable now, the current situation might take on a “yo-yo effect” based on the people’s adherence to protocols.