The Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 and Cholera says it is monitoring global trends on Covid-19 to ensure Malawians are protected in case of a fresh wave.

Task force co-chairperson Wilfred Chalamira Nkhoma said in an interview on Wednesday that they will continue to monitor the trends, especially at this time when some people are yet to return from the festive holidays abroad.

A man gets his Covid-19 jab in this file photograph

He said Malawi maintains the requirement for proof of Covid-19 vaccination for all travellers entering the country or show a negative PCR test result that is no older than 72 hours.

Said Chalamira Nkhoma: “We note that currently the European region has seen no increase in the number of cases since mid-December last year. In America, they had an increase, but the cases started going down around the third week of December.

“And there was another spike in the Western Pacific region where China and Japan are, until the last week of December, but that is also stabilising. In Africa, South East Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, there has been no increase at all.”

Recent British Broadcasting Corporation reports indicate that in the United States of America, Covid-19 cases have more than doubled in a week from a new variant of the Omicron, the XBB 1.5. China has also been registering increased cases of new infections.

Chalamira Nkhoma pointed out that the new variant has similar properties to the other Omicron variants, but was relieved that in America and the Western Pacific, the numbers are coming down.

“We appreciate that in the African region, there is no country including our own neighbours such as Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, and South Africa that have reported increased cases.

“But the good thing is that the same vaccine that we used against the Omicron over the past one and a half years is still effective against these branches of Omicron,” he said.

As of November 29 2022, about 3.2 million people in the country were fully vaccinated, representing 23.9 percent of the targeted 13.4 million population.

This means Malawi is yet to achieve the herd immunity required to protect the whole community.

It also comes at a time when there is a lot of reluctance among the population to get the Covid-19 vaccine despite efforts by the Ministry of Health to get people vaccinated.

Health experts Gama Bandawe and Adamson Muula in past interviews cast doubt that the country will achieve the target to vaccinate about 13.4 million people by June 30 2023.

They observed that government has tried to raise awareness on the importance of the Covid-19 vaccine, but most Malawians have negative attitude towards it.

Muula, who is Kamuzu University of Health Sciences epidemiology and public health professor, observed that it will be difficult to increase the Covid-19 vaccine uptake as the pandemic is no longer visible in most communities.

“In the absence of ill health, disease or deaths, it will be difficult to increase Covid-19 vaccine uptake, unless they are encouraged by something,” he said.

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