Coronavirus: Hong Kong children aged 12 to 15 can begin booking vaccination slots from Friday, get jabs on Monday
- Shots available to new age group via individual or group bookings at vaccination centres or through schools where enough staff, students and parents sign up
- Primary school pupils may become eligible for the inoculation programme once clinical data shows it is safe, government says
The step, revealed by the government on Thursday, meant an additional 240,000 residents would be covered by the programme, taking the total to just over 90 per cent of the city’s population of 7.5 million, but the drive remained sluggish and only about 15 per cent of people were fully inoculated.
“Vaccination is vitally important in protecting adolescents and children from Covid-19 infections, stopping its spread in the community and can raise the whole of society’s immunity,” civil service minister Patrick Nip Tak-kuen said, adding the next three months would be the “critical stage”.
Nip urged all unvaccinated residents to receive at least a first shot by late August as he noted the city’s 29 community vaccination centres were scheduled to close in late September.
At the same time as the government was struggling to energise the programme ahead of that deadline, authorities were succeeding in tamping down the spread of the virus, with only two new infections emerging on Thursday, one imported from Britain and the other from Mauritania. Fewer than five people tested preliminary-positive for the virus.