Kuwait Begins Vaccinating Children Ages 5-11 Against COVID-19

Kuwait on Thursday extended its coronavirus vaccination campaign to children ages 5 to 11, kicking off the campaign at the Kuwait Vaccination Center in Hawalli Governorate. Children in this age group across the country will get two doses of the vaccine, eight weeks apart, to protect them against the new variants of COVID-19. Vaccination is voluntary for the children, and priority will be given to children with an elevated risk of complications from COVID-19, including those who have had organ or bone marrow transplants, cancer, diabetes, or neurological, cardiac, pulmonary, renal, or hepatic diseases. Kuwait has experienced a sharp uptick in new daily cases since mid-December and reported 5,990 new cases and two deaths on Thursday. It has seen 564,735 cases and 2,503 deaths over the course of the pandemic. The effective reproduction rate (R), the estimated average number of new infections caused by a single infected individual, hit a high of 2.7 on January 5 before dropping to 1.23 by the end of January. About 75.28% of the population is considered fully vaccinated – the third-highest rate of vaccination in the MENA region after the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.