HAVANA, Sept 3 (NNN-Xinhua) — Cuba prepares to resume classes next Monday through distance learning amid a third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and children and adolescents will return to face-to-face lessons once they have been fully jabbed against COVID-19.
“While schools across the country remain closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students will be reached using televised lessons,” Cuban Education Minister Ena Elsa Velazquez said in a televised speech.
The Caribbean nation will start vaccinating adolescents against coronavirus in the coming days and all children aged two to 11 from mid-September.
The COVID-19 rollout for children on the island will follow a format similar to that of the polio vaccination campaign, “with many people getting vaccinated in a short time,” Cuba’s Finlay Institute of Vaccines said on its Twitter account.
Maria Elena Soto, a senior official at the Cuban Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), said that the vaccination campaign for kids will be carried out in line with international standards.
“Children and adolescents will receive the three doses of (Cuba’s) Abdala or Soberana COVID-19 vaccines,” she said, adding that all workers from the educational sector will also be vaccinated.
It came after an extra 6,208 new coronavirus cases were recorded in Cuba in the last 24 hours, alongside another 87 deaths.
On top of that, the number of children and adolescents infected with the virus across the country remains high, despite a slight decline in COVID-19 cases over the past week, MINSAP said.
At present, a COVID-19 vaccination rollout involving people aged 19 and above is underway across the island amid the deadliest outbreak of the contagious disease.
More than 2,400 schools and more than 40 higher education institutions in Cuba have been turned into isolation centers and vaccination sites.
At the same time, university faculty and students continue to work as volunteers in support of the nationwide response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic on the island in March 2020, Cuba has registered 665,672 confirmed cases and 5,464 related deaths.
So far, more than 3.7 million people, or about 34 percent of people aged 19 and above in Cuba, have received the third dose of a coronavirus vaccine. — NNN-XINHUA
