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Coronavirus pandemic
ChinaScience

Learning from Hong Kong, China targets elderly in Covid-19 vaccine drive

  • The drive is fuelled by the high transmissibility of Omicron and the toll among seniors in the southern city
  • Just over half of the country’s people over 60 have had a booster

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The race against time is on in China to vaccinate the elderly. Photo: Xinhua
Echo Xie
China is shifting the focus of its Covid-19 vaccination campaign to target the elderly, as it battles its worst coronavirus outbreak since the pandemic began.

In the early stages of the pandemic, China gave vaccination priority to health workers, people at higher risk of catching Covid-19, and essential workers.

Elderly people were considered at lower risk of exposure, given that many lived inland away from border areas and in rural communities.

Now provinces and cities across the country are encouraging unvaccinated people above 60 to get their first shot, given the vaccination rates in this group compared with the same cohort in other countries.

In South Korea, for example, more than 90 per cent of those aged 60 and above had had booster shots by the time the Omicron variant of the coronavirus started to spread across the nation in January, according to a Bloomberg report.

But in China, out of the 264 million people aged over 60, about 80 per cent of them had been fully vaccinated as of last Tuesday and only 55 per cent have received a booster shot, according to the National Health Commission.

By comparison, around 88 per cent of the country’s 1.41 billion people are fully vaccinated.

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