Unvaccinated teachers, support staff barred from entering school premises – Education Ministry

By Abdul Kimera

Though official figures show that 40% of Egyptian teachers have been vaccinated against the coronavirus, the education ministry has barred unvaccinated teachers and other staff from entering schools and university premises.

In the academic year that is due to start in two weeks’ time, the education minister Tariq Shawqi said that unvaccinated staff must pay for two PCR tests a week at a prohibitive rate of almost $100 to stay at their jobs.

This announcement came in at a time when the North African nation is battling with the virus as numbers of cases continue to rise higher each day.

As of Friday night, 568 new coronavirus cases were detected bringing the total number of positive cases to 2,299,710 in the country since the outbreak last year.

The health ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed said that 36 patients died in the last 24hours bringing the total death toll to 17,110 since the pandemic began.

Though Egypt also plans to release over one million doses of the locally made Sinovac vaccine, the Greek government supported the country this week with a shipment of 250,000 doses of AstraZeneca.

The country’s recovery rate from the coronavirus has reached 84.3% and a number of 252,471 recoveries have been witnessed as per the health ministry statistics.

Egypt has received over 30 million coronavirus doses of AstraZeneca, Sinopharm, Johnson&Johnson.