Monday, November 15, 2021

Qatar Coronavirus Updates – case rates, boosters, statistics

Community cases are steady at 100-120 a day. Hospitalizations are in the 90s now, a slight increase. I spoke with someone in the medical field and they told me that many of the cases were in kids due to schools being open -- but not all. Might be issues with vaccine effectiveness waning.

Which might explain why yesterday the Government announced they were moving forward the booster shot timing. Before you were eligible eight months after your second dose but they announced it will now be six months, a timing similar to other Western countries. I got my second dose in mid-June so I still have a month before I can get my booster. No word yet on when the vaccine will be approved for children aged 5-11 though.

As an aside I have been seeing various statistics regarding Qatar’s vaccination rate on websites, whether John Hopkins or CTV VaccineTracker, and they have Qatar’s rate too low (79-80%). The reason for this is they use population statistics that are old and based on projections of what Qatar’s population would be, rather than just going to the Qatar Government’s Planning and Statistics Authority to get the real number, which they update monthly. Granted, these websites don’t have time to update population stats for the 200+ countries in the world but they are using a population of 2.8m and it’s actually around 2.6m, which makes a big difference.

Per the Ministry of Public Health, 84.8% of the population of Qatar has had both doses of a vaccine. It’s likely why case rates are still really low compared to the US, UK, and many other countries in Europe.

Interesting update on travel, the UK was recently added to Qatar’s “red list” for travel. Not good news for Brits. I wasn’t planning on going there anytime soon anyway though.

Well, guess I'll just chill and wait for the latest wave in Europe to calm down. It'll be nice when I get a booster shot though.

 

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