Kenya on Thursday, May 20, recorded 494 more Covid-19 positive cases in the last 24 hours. The cases were reported from a sample size of 6,428 - dropping to a positivity rate of 7.7% from 9.1% recorded on Wednesday.
Health CS Mutahi Kagwe also announced that the government had ordered and was expecting 150,000 doses of the AstraZeneca Vaccine from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) before June.
DRC had ordered the doses but was unable to distribute them in good time due to a poor distribution network. Kenya hopes to distribute them before they expire.
The central African country has one of the poorest road and infrastructure in the world.
Kenya, on its part, ordered one million vaccines under the WHO's Covax programme - which were obtained from an Indian manufacturer.
The campaign, however, run into headwinds after India banned exportation of vaccines after it was hit by a lethal variant that has ravaged the country over the past two months.
Kenya has opened discussions with Covax which will see top private hospitals in the country buy Covid-19 vaccines for their wealthy clientele.FILE
Of the positive cases recorded on Thursday, 481 are Kenyans while 13 are foreigners. 332 are male and 162 are female while the youngest case is a one-day-old infant and the oldest is aged 100.
At the same time, 50 patients have recovered, 27 from home-based care, and 23 from the various hospitals around the country bringing the total number of recoveries to 114,285 of whom 83,081 are from home-based care and isolation program, while 31,204 are from various health facilities.
Regrettably, 5 deaths have been reported in the last 24 hours, two of them having occurred on diverse dates within the last one month while three are late deaths reported after conducting facility record audits in the last one month. Total fatalities now stand at 3,040.
Currently, there are 1,085 patients admitted to various health facilities countrywide, while 4,624 are on home-based isolation and care.
109 patients are in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), 20 of whom are on ventilatory support, and 67 on supplemental oxygen. 22 patients are on observation.
Another 86 patients are separately on supplementary oxygen with 81 of them in the general wards and five in the High Dependency Unit (HDU).
As of today, a total of 948,980 people had been vaccinated against Covid-19 countrywide. Of these 288,146 are aged 58 years and above, health workers 163,490, teachers 149,018, security officers 80,153 and others are 266,173.
