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 - from Oct 4 to 16 - involved 68 locations and officials visited over 39,000 people.

       "We visited a total of 7,708 houses involving 39,548 people in Sandakan including 30,410 aged 12 and above," Dr Rose said when contacted Sunday (Oct 17).

       Since the implementation of the Ravo programme, 30,215 or 99.36% of those eligible have received their jabs, Dr Rose said.

       Sandakan was among the few districts that saw a vaccination rate of less than 60%.

       Dr Rose said throughout their programme, they faced challenges especially, with geographical factors.

       "Many of the areas covered are in rural places such as estates and unstructured houses including squatter homes, so it took us longer to reach there," she said.

       She said upon their visits, they discovered those unvaccinated were actually not huge in numbers, contrary to what the statistics had shown because many, especially non-citizens, were no longer living in Sandakan.

       Dr Rose said the places or houses to visit were those provided by local authorities including local leaders.

       Asked if anyone rejected the door-to-door vaccination programme, she said there was none.

       She said the people they approached gave full cooperation.

       Their next stop would be to Tawau and Kalabakan starting Monday (Oct 18).