DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – According to the country’s health authorities, the United Arab Emirates is on track to have half of its population vaccinated against the coronavirus before a deadline it set itself in late March.
The little desert sheik of 10 million residents began deploying her vaccination campaign to the public late last year after making the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine available to primary care health workers and government officials starting in September. And in terms of vaccination coverage, the UAE’s national program is now the second highest in the world, after Israel.
More than 1.8 million people have already received the Sinopharm vaccine, which is available free of charge to all citizens and residents. That’s more than a quadrupling of the per capita vaccination rate in the US And the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine developed by the US and Germany is being rolled out in Dubai, currently in its first phase, which is reserved for people over 60. people with pre-existing health problems and frontline workers.
A health worker shows a dose of the Chinese Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine at a vaccination center in the Jordanian capital Amman on January 13, 2021.
Khalil Mazraawi | AFP | Getty Images
Both vaccines require two injections spaced 28 days apart, and 28 days after receiving the second injection, patients will no longer need to be quarantined, but will still have to wear masks and social distance, the National Emergency Crisis has reported. and the country’s Disaster Management Authority said
And while taking the vaccine is optional, NCEMA says, it’s strongly encouraged. Government officials in Abu Dhabi who choose not to take any of the vaccines must undergo a PCR test every two weeks.
“We are very pleased with the progress we have made,” Omar Ghobash, UAE’s assistant minister for culture and public diplomacy, told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble on Sunday. “There are clearly people who are still getting sick and sadly dying, but in general we think we have managed to strike the balance between health and safety on the one hand and economic viability on the other.”
Sinopharm’s developers say the vaccine is 86% effective, while the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine was found to be 95% effective, although some medical professionals have expressed skepticism about the Chinese-made vaccine due to the lack of published data on its development and taste it. In November, UAE leaders, including Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, tweeted images of themselves getting the Sinopharm shot.
Vaccinations are progressing amid a spike in cases
The number of cases has skyrocketed in the Gulf in less than three weeks since late December, as tourists flocked to Dubai’s fully open beaches, restaurants and shopping malls. Despite visitors requiring a negative PCR test result before boarding or upon arrival, many suspect that a more transmissible strain of the virus first identified in the UK is at least partly to blame, given the large number of British tourists in the emirate for the holiday season.
The jump in the number of cases – now averaging over 3,000 a day compared to about 1,000 a day at the end of December – led the UK to remove the UAE from its ‘safe travel corridor’, even as British travelers are banned from many countries due to fears. the new virus strain. The UAE had successfully kept the number of cases below 2,000 per day throughout 2020.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the UAE has registered 256,732 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 751 deaths. On Sunday there was a record number of 3,453 a day.
Sun worshipers sit along a beach in the Gulf of Dubai emirate on July 24, 2020, with the Burj al-Arab hotel behind it. After a painful four-month halt in tourism that ended earlier in July, Dubai is billing itself as a safe destination with the means to ward off the coronavirus.
KARIM SAHIB | AFP via Getty Images
Still, it looks like the party city and regional commercial capital of Dubai will continue its vaccination campaign for the time being while the tourism-dependent economy remains open.
The neighboring oil-rich capital Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, has been much more conservative, requiring a series of negative PCR test results over a span of days for anyone wanting to enter the emirate – even from other emirates in the country.
As for Dubai, the wearing of a mask remains mandatory in all public locations, except for activities such as eating or vigorous exercise, and authorities are reminding residents to distance themselves socially. The emirate’s openness, which gradually increased from the summer onwards, followed a period of one of the world’s toughest lockdowns in March and April.
By New Year’s Eve, the Dubai government allowed residents to hold gatherings in their homes for up to 30 people. Hotels that were once almost completely empty see an occupancy rate of over 70% as tourists flee their own countries for a sense of normalcy and warm weather.
“They balance personal responsibility with an economy that needs to move forward,” Ghobash said of the country.
“To vaccinate the largest possible percentage of society” is the country’s goal, the NCEMA tweeted earlier this month, to “access the acquired immunity as a result of vaccination, which will help reduce the number of cases and reduce the disease. under control. “