• The conference is scheduled for August 23 to 26 at Makueni Boys High School.
• Wambora said counties are also scaling up oxygen provision at Level 4 and 5 hospitals.
Governors have slashed by half the number of guests invited to this year’s devolution conference given the ongoing Covid-19 threat.
Council of Governors chairman Martin Wambora said they will only allow a maximum of 3,000 delegates instead of the earlier projected 6,000.
Wambora said the Ministry of Health is fully involved in the planning to ensure all Covid-19 protocols are observed.
“This will be the last conference before the election and all delegates must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19,” he told journalists in Nairobi on Wednesday.
The conference is scheduled for August 23 to 26 at Makueni Boys High School.
Wambora added that counties have received an additional 17 PCR machines to help with faster testing.
“In the same breathe we appeal to the Ministry of Health to now go a step further by providing the counties with the much-needed testing reagents and testing kits,” he said.
He said counties still have a large capacity of unoccupied isolation, ICU and HDU facilities.
The country has a total of 7,566 isolation beds but 1,287 are occupied, bringing the number of free beds to 6,279.
He said from a total capacity of 512 ICU beds in 31 counties, 192 are occupied and 320 are free.
Cumulatively, there are 284 HDU beds in the counties, with 162 occupied and 122 beds free.
Wambora said counties are also scaling up oxygen provision at level 4 and 5 hospitals.
“This is being done in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and our partners World Bank, USAID and the Global Fund,” he added.
“Counties have embarked on short-term interventions, including procurement of additional gaseous and liquid oxygen to match the increased demand, expansion of piped outlets and repair of non-functional oxygen generation plants.”
The council and the Health ministry have also made plans for additional vaccines to be provided to the Makueni county government so that service providers like hoteliers and boda boda riders are vaccinated before the conference.
The conference had earlier been scheduled for May 3 to 7 but was postponed due to the Covid situation in the country.
The 7th Annual Devolution Conference will focus on climate action, in particular the impact and the role of sub-national governments.
In an advisory released on Friday, the WHO said recent estimates of the Astrazeneca vaccine's effectiveness against hospitalisation with Delta were 71 per cent after one dose and 92 per cent after two doses.
“In view of these findings, WHO currently recommends the use of ChAdOx1-S recombinant vaccine (the Oxford-Astrazeneca jab) according to the prioritisation roadmap even if virus variants are present in a country,” the WHO said in its updated recommendations.
Delta variant is estimated to be 60 per cent more infectious than the Alpha variant.