The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday said it was reviewing COVID-19 data from Seychelles after more than a third of people, who tested positive for COVID-19 in the past week, had been fully vaccinated, reported Reuters.
According to Seychelles’ health ministry and the WHO, the majority of the people who tested positive had not been vaccinated or had only received one dose. It has been found that no one who had died had been fully vaccinated and nearly all of those needing treatments for severe or critical cases were unvaccinated.
The WHO, however, said that it was closely monitoring the situation in the Indian Ocean nation, which has a population of less than 100,000 and has been reporting daily case numbers in the low hundreds.
“Our teams continue to review the data, assess progress and understand the trends,” a WHO spokeswoman told the Reuters news agency.
The average number of positive coronavirus cases increased from 120 on April 30 to 314 on May 8, the ministry said in a statement late on Monday. The statement added that almost two-thirds of the positive cases were found to be close contacts of another person testing positive. Some 37 percent of those testing positive had received both doses of a vaccine.
About 57 percent of the people who have been fully vaccinated have received China’s Sinopharm vaccine, while 43 percent have received AstraZeneca shots. Nearly 60 percent of the population have had two doses, the WHO said.
The Seychelles health ministry said 80 percent of the coronavirus-infected people needing hospital treatment had not been vaccinated and tended to be people with comorbidities.
Seychelles has so far reported less than 8,200 coronavirus cases since the pandemic began.
The WHO said vaccination alone would not stop transmission completely and that people must continue to follow preventive health measures including wearing masks, social distancing, and hand washing.
