Health department: study suggests increased dosage or younger age range needed to protect against WHO-listed virus
The provincial government of Saskatchewan will begin immunizing children against a potentially deadly virus in the province.
The disease is the same that has infected more than 2,000 people in Australia and is believed to have killed at least one person there.
The Saskatchewan department of health’s board approved on Thursday the “first critical step” toward immunizing against coronavirus-19 (COVID-19), which has the potential to be deadly, health officials said.
Even with childhood immunizations, respiratory infections can kill one in five people, and illness as a teenager can turn fatal.
Affected individuals include the World Health Organization’s and American Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) list of coronavirus-related deaths, and someone infected with the virus in the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Australia last year.
A coronavirus has a deadlier toll than other viruses that have affected humans such as Sars and Ebola.
“The board’s vote today commits to providing recommendations on the recommended adult immunization regimen for COVID-19 in Saskatchewan and its relatives,” the health department said in a statement.
“The findings and recommendations will be presented to the board as part of a report due in November.”
COVID-19 is a Category 2 coronavirus, which means it was first identified as a cause of infection in humans in 2010. It is thought to be one of four or five new coronaviruses that emerged in 2013.
Two clusters of infections in 2014 have been identified with multiple deaths occurring after infection with the viruses.
A study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and published in March found it was “highly likely” that children, most of whom are infected with COVID-19 in the first place, could be protected by increased vaccine doses or by selecting the age group under which children are most at risk.