JEDDAH: Health experts are advocating continued adherence to health and precautionary measures and foresee an end to the pandemic in Saudi Arabia as more people receive their second dose of the vaccine.
In an interview with Al-Ekhbariya channel, infectious diseases consultant Dr. Khalid Alilah said receiving two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine should end the pandemic within 3 to 6 months in the Kingdom. He said that the inclusion of vaccination for the 12-18 age group with the rest of society will lead to a change in the epidemiological curve, as has been observed in the past days.
“The more we see a decline in critical cases, intensive care cases and deaths, the more positive the indications are for the end of the pandemic,” said Alilah.
There was a significant decline in the curve of COVID-19 infections in the Kingdom during recent days; 731 new cases of COVID-19 were recorded in the Kingdom on Sunday, followed by 796 on Monday, 864 on Tuesday, 751 on Wednesday, 766 on Thursday, 681 on Friday and 609 on Saturday, raising the total number of cases to 537,983 people.

The authorities reported 1,651 new recovered cases, taking the total number of recoveries to 522,009. With the high recovery count, the number of active cases has also shown a significant decline as there are currently only 7,575 active cases, 1,360 of them critical.
The highest recorded number of infections was in the Riyadh region (161) and Makkah region (106). The rest of the Kingdom’s regions are recording numbers below the 100 mark — Jouf recording only 10 cases on Saturday.
Eleven new deaths were reported, raising the death toll to 8,399.
The Kingdom has administered more than 31.6 million COVID-19 vaccines so far at a rate of 90.79 doses per hundred people. More than 59.51 percent of the country’s population have been inoculated with at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. There were 69,636 PCR tests carried out in the past 24 hours, raising the total number conducted in the Kingdom to more than 26.3 million.