As citizens reject preventive health measures such as mask-wearing and getting vaccinated, the virus is spreading across cities. The head of Erbil’s health directorate told Rudaw’s Rozhan Abubakir that those who are hospitalized are the unvaccinated.
“If we look at the hospitalized patients, most of them are those who have not been vaccinated,” Dlovan Muhammad said, calling on more people to get vaccinated.
The increase in cases comes a little over a month after students and teachers returned to classes for the new school year. Schools in the Kurdistan Region have closed down and reopened a number of times since the start of the pandemic.
In a new set of rules to fight the coronavirus, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) on Monday said that all teachers and students over 18 in schools and universities must be vaccinated by December 1 across the Region. All government employees must be vaccinated by January 1, 2022.
The KRG has also reinstated a Region-wide mask mandate.
A third wave of the coronavirus hit the Kurdistan Region in July, seeing record-high numbers of daily infections. The surge contributed to an increased demand for vaccines, but the decline in the rate of infections and misleading information has so-far discouraged people from getting vaccinated.
Only 18% of Erbil residents have received their vaccine, according to Muhammad.
Sulaimani is also seeing a low rate of vaccination as the surge in infection threatens the city.
“The situation in Sulaimani is different compared to other cities because the figures have clearly increased,” Hersh Said Salim, the deputy head of Sulaimani's health directorate, said. The Raparin administration is recording a high number of cases, with hospital beds reaching capacity.
“Around 13-14% of the people have been vaccinated,” he added.
The situation in Duhok is also concerning. The head of the city’s health directorate , Afrasiab Musa, told Rudaw that 26% of the people in the city have been vaccinated.
Over 900,000 vaccines of all three types - Pfizer, Sinopharm, and AstraZeneca - are available in the Kurdistan Region, according to the Health Ministry.
Iraq has warned of a new strain spreading through the country, urging people to get vaccinated, state media reported.
To date, Iraq has recorded 2,046,274 cases and 22,961 deaths since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, including in the Kurdistan Region.
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