36 Thousand School Children In Pekanbaru Not Yet Vaccinated Against COVID-19 Not Allowed To Join PTM

Illustration of school children following PTM (Antara)

PEKANBARU - As many as 36,000 school-age children in Pekanbaru have not been vaccinated against COVID-19. As a result, they have not been able to participate in Face-to-face Learning (PTM).

The Pekanbaru City Education Office noted that this number represents 35 percent of the 103,017 school-age children 6-11 years in Pekanbaru.

"We hope that parents are willing to have their children vaccinated to prevent exposure to the virus," said Pekanbaru City Education Agency Head Ismardi Ilyas in Pekanbaru, Friday, March 25.

The Pekanbaru City Government previously issued a circular regarding the COVID-19 vaccination for students, as a condition for PTM. However, there are still parents who do not agree with their children being vaccinated for various reasons.

"We will continue to apply the circular because vaccination is a joint effort to create group immunity and under current conditions, it is the most appropriate," he said, as reported by Antara.

For this reason, he asked for understanding from parents so that their children can be vaccinated so they can undergo direct learning, this is an effort to protect students from COVID-19 during PTM in the school environment.

"We encourage parents of students to immediately take their children to the nearest health facility so that they can inject the vaccine, because children aged 6 years can already receive vaccine injections as their protection from COVID-19," he said.

So this mandatory vaccine policy for students has come into effect one month ago in Pekanbaru. "This is for the child's immune system," he said.

Moreover, currently Pekanbaru City is still implementing the Enforcement of Community Activity Restrictions (PPKM) level 3, meaning that the spread of COVID-19 cases is still quite high, so vaccination is needed as a self-protection effort.