This archive report was first published on 25 August 2020.
Published on August 25, 2020, Kenya's health authorities revealed that more than 1,000 children had contracted COVID-19, five months after the pandemic broke out in the country.
According to Health Chief Administrative Secretary Rashid Aman, 768 children aged ten years and above were infected, while 430 children under the age of five contracted the virus.
As of August 24, Kenya had recorded 32,557 positive cases, with 554 fatalities and 18,895 recoveries.
"It was thought that children could be a community reservoir of transmission in households, but emerging evidence suggests that they may not be super-spreaders of the virus," Dr. Aman said.
Although the mortality rate among children is low, Dr. Aman emphasized the need for mothers to take precautions during and after pregnancy to prevent neonatal mortality.
"The first 28 days of life is the most vulnerable period of a child's survival. Children face the highest risk of dying in their first month of life," Dr. Aman stated, citing a recent estimate by the UN Inter-agency Group for child mortality that Kenya's neonatal mortality rate rose to 29 per 1,000 births in 2018.
On the same day, Kenya recorded 193 new COVID-19 cases from 3,381 samples tested since Sunday, bringing the total number of cases to 32,557 since March.
As of March, Kenya had tested 425,364 samples.
