WARSAW, June 1 (Xinhua) -- Poland will offer COVID-19 vaccination to children aged between 12 and 15 from June 7, the government's vaccination campaign coordinator said here on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the number of vaccine doses administered in the country has exceeded 20 million.
Children above the age of 12 are the latest group to be offered the jab in Poland after the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for the cohort.
"We are talking about more than 2.5 million pupils," said Michal Dworczyk, the government's coordinator of the vaccination campaign at a press conference. "For now, we are going to vaccinate them the same way we do all other people at vaccination stations and general vaccination points."
Vaccination at schools is planned to be started in September. By that time, the results of studies on the vaccination of children in the 7 to 11 age group should also be available, Dworczyk said.
In total, 13.7 million Poles have received 20,084,619 vaccine doses since the campaign started in late December. To date, 6.4 million Poles, or 16.63 percent of the population, have been fully vaccinated.
In the past 24 hours, 588 new coronavirus cases have been confirmed. This number is comparable to the same period last year during the first wave of the pandemic. In total, 2,872,868 Poles have been confirmed to have been infected with COVID-19 at one point, and 73,856 people have succumbed to the disease since the start of the pandemic in the country of 38 million.
Some of the restrictions were lifted in May. Hospitality businesses were allowed to partially reopen and the mask mandate was eased. Despite the decreasing infection rates, Health Minister Adam Niedzielski said that any further relaxation of the restrictions in June would be "cosmetic" only.
"At this moment, Poland is ahead of the rest of Europe in terms of the liberalization of restrictions," he said. Enditem
