KUCHING, March 13 — The number of Sarawak’s Covid-19 patients involving children aged 11 and below has maintained at 160 and above since March 7, according to Ministry of Health’s CovidNow website.
Such figure has been on the rise since last Monday (March 7) at 160 cases, and the highest so far was 188 cases on Friday (March 11). Sarawak recorded 857 cases on March 7 and 1,745 cases (March 11).
The number of cases for this age group was 167 on March 8, 169 cases (March 9) and 180 cases (March 10) while the total infections reported for these days were 1,903 cases, 1,727 cases and 1,963 cases respectively.
Seven weeks ago, 9.6 per cent of Sarawak’s total cases involved children aged four and below, 8.7 per cent were children aged five to 11 and 7.6 per cent – adolescents between 12 and 17.
These rates dropped to 1.5 per cent (0-4 age group), 0.8 per cent (5-11 age group) and 1.5 per cent (12-17 age group) five weeks ago.
This week, they rose to 6.1 per cent (0-4 age group), 5.9 per cent (5-11 age group) and four per cent (12-17 age group).
Two age groups namely 18-29 and 30-39 registered the most number of cases in Sarawak, and had each contributed above 20 per cent to the total infections since five weeks ago.
Yesterday, Sarawak recorded 1,427 new cases, bringing the total number of infections to 277,277.
The state’s death toll for Covid-19 stood at 1,639, of which, 345 were brought-in-dead (BID) cases.
Apart from that, Sarawak’s intensive care unit (ICU) bed utilisation rate for Covid-19 patients was 49.3 per cent yesterday, the seventh lowest in the country.
Such rate is relatively lower than the national rate at 56.7 per cent.
Putrajaya had the highest ICU bed usage rate at 80 per cent while Labuan recorded the lowest rate at a mere 16.7 per cent.
Meanwhile, Sarawak has continued to top the vaccination rate for children aged five to 11 in the country, at 62.6 per cent yesterday.
This way exceeds the national rate at 32.2 per cent for this age group to have received at least the first dose.
For adolescents between 12 and 17 who have been administered at least two doses, Sarawak’s 90.6 per cent vaccination rate is lower than the national rate at 91.2 per cent.
Also lower than the national rate at 97.5 per cent was the vaccination rate for adults which Sarawak registered at 90.9 per cent.
In terms of total population, Sarawak recorded vaccination rate at 75.8 per cent and this is also below the national rate at 78.9 per cent.
As of yesterday, more than 6.04 million vaccine doses had been administered to individuals across the state.
Of the total, over 2.36 million were first doses followed by more than 2.14 million second doses and over 1.53 boosters. — Borneo Post
