Improve access to Covid vaccines around Kampala

This week, this newspaper reported that the number of hours people are spending in the queues at Covid-19 vaccination centres in Kampala has gone significantly high.

Some people interviewed reported spending an entire morning or afternoon hopping from one health centre to another in order to avoid the long queues.

At Kisenyi Health Centre IV, for instance, the single health worker administering the jabs had about 600 people waiting in the queue.

This comes weeks after government closed Covid-19 outreach services in Kampala to focus on the door-to-door polio vaccination campaign. The countrywide exercise that was supposed to be carried out between January 14 and 16 targeted eight million children below the age of five.

Mid last year, Uganda confirmed polio viruses from two samples collected from the sewage plants in Bugolobi and Lubigi which are two of the sentinel environment surveillance site in Kampala.

But the Daily Monitor story ran on the same week the newspaper reported that up to 5,000 learners have Covid-19 symptoms. This was according to a recent surveillance report compiled by the Health and Education ministries from primary and secondary schools countrywide.

Daily updates from the Ministry of Health also show that Uganda is still registering cases in their hundreds, with the highest number recorded this week being 285 new cases on Thursday. We could be registering fewer numbers compared to what it was at the peak of the third wave about a month ago, but the figures show us that Covid-19 is still a threat.

And the news that government is set to destroy more than 400,000 doses of expired Covid-19 vaccines at a time when less than half of the targeted 22 million people have been vaccinated only goes to show that we should encourage uptake of the vaccine. About 13 million out of 34.5 million doses of vaccines that Uganda has received are yet to be used.

That people voluntarily queue up for hours around health centres in Kampala should be reason enough for government to reinstate mobile vaccine centres. Workers at the few health centres are overwhelmed, sometimes handling more than 1,000 people a day.

Eighty percent of the targeted people in Kampala could be vaccinated, but we see that majority of the cases recorded by the Ministry of Health do come from the capital city.

More than two weeks after the door-to-door polio vaccination drive was supposed to be concluded, it is our appeal that the Ministry of Health shifts attention to Covid-19 vaccination in targeted areas. Reinstate the mobile vaccine centres so that more people are encouraged to go and get the jab.

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