Hurrah! Ministry count shows no Covid-19 deaths in 2023

Covid-19 has not killed any Kenyan this year, according to new data from the Ministry of Health.

This is the first time the country has gone three straight months without any deaths, the ministry said.

The last reported deaths were eight people between November and December last year.

Health CS Susan Nakhumicha said there is also no Kenyan admitted to any hospital with Covid-19-related complications.

The data also reveals that Kenya’s plans to vaccinate about 70 per cent of its adult population by December 2022 failed, and only 37 per cent were fully jabbed.

“The cumulative number of deaths [stands] at 5,688,” CS Nakhumucha said in a statement on Wednesday.

“There are no patients currently admitted in health facilities…. No patient is currently on supplemental oxygen or in the ICU.”

She said half of the 5,688 Kenyans killed by the disease since 2020 are people above 60 years.

The first Kenyan to die of Covid-19 was a 66-year-old man on March 26, 2020, at the Aga Khan University Hospital ICU in Nairobi.

However, health experts say that despite the fall in infections and deaths, the threat of Covid-19 remains.

University of Nairobi medical microbiologist Prof Walter Jaoko said the number of Kenyans who are vaccinated is extremely low.

“Kenya we have data up to February 19, we were only 26.5 per cent,” he noted, saying Kenya needs to reach herd immunity by vaccinating at least 75 per cent of the population.

“Natural infection takes a long time to acquire herd immunity because you don't know who is infected, who is not. And it's unethical to expose people to the infections so that they become infected and the country or the region to develop herd immunity,” he told journalists in Nairobi.

“Vaccination is faster because we can give people vaccines safely and ethically without exposing them to infection. In natural infection, there is a risk of serious disease and even death, whereas vaccination prevents you from getting serious disease, and even from dying,” he added.

Kenya had planned to fully vaccinate 19 million adults (70 per cent of the adult population) by the end of June 2022 and the entire adult population of 27 million people by the end of 2022.

However, all these plans floundered last year as the country went into elections.

The MoH said by February this year only 10 million adults had been fully vaccinated.

At the beginning of 2022 following global reports of waning immunity from Covid-19 vaccinations, Kenya also started giving third doses as booster shots and aimed to administer 4.2 million booster shots by June 2022 to all eligible adults.

However, by February this year, only 1.9 booster doses had been administered.

Kenya had also planned to fully vaccinate the entire teenage population of 5.8 million by the end of December 2022.

However, by the end of February this year, only 798,963 teenagers had been fully vaccinated, which is just about 10 per cent of the target.

However, this week the World Health Organization's vaccine experts revised their global Covid-19 vaccination recommendations and said healthy kids and teenagers are considered low priority and do not need to get a shot.

The most popular vaccine in Kenya has been the Pfizer (10.8 million doses administered so far), followed by Astrazeneca (10.4 million doses), Johnson and Johnson (7.3 million), Moderna (2.8 million), and the Sinopharm of which only 200,000 doses have been given.

By the end of February, about 1.16 million doses of vaccines were lying at the Central Vaccines store in Kitengela.

Trends in the last three years have shown infections drastically reduce during the hot season (January-March) and rise rapidly in the cold season (May-August).

Infections also surge after the Easter Holiday, when many urban residents traditionally travel to visit family in other parts of the country.

Nakhumicha said the total number of confirmed cases in the country since March 2020 now stands at 342,976, with 3,981,257 cumulative tests conducted.