Beijing city offers elderly COVID shot-related health insurance to ease hesitancy

Men and women go by a poster encouraging aged folks to get vaccinated towards the coronavirus illness (COVID-19), in the vicinity of a residential compound in Beijing, China March 30, 2022. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/File Image

BEIJING, May perhaps 27 (Reuters) – China’s money is presenting elderly residents condition-backed insurance coverage for “health-related mishaps” joined to COVID-19 pictures to simplicity vaccination hesitancy among individuals most susceptible, as Beijing ramps up inoculations through its worst outbreak.

Chinese officials have pointed to reasonably reduced vaccination premiums amid the elderly as a critical weak point in its “dynamic zero-COVID” method.

The town of 22 million people experienced entirely inoculated 97.7% of its adult citizens as of September very last calendar year, but only 80.6% of persons aged 60 and above experienced gained their first dose by mid-April this 12 months, in accordance to metropolis officers.

The new insurance policy system, with premiums coated by the government, aims to “reduce issues more than vaccination among the the aged group and their household associates”, state television noted late on Thursday, citing details from the Beijing business office of China’s banking and insurance coverage regulator.

The coverage policy payout could be as high as 500,000 yuan ($74,200) for each human being for a one advantage, according to the report, which didn’t give precise details of the program.

In other places, many districts in the northern metropolis of Tianjin, also battling a clean Omicron cluster, have pledged to “strictly restrict” entry into venues these types of as stadiums for unvaccinated senior citizens who never have professional medical conditions that render vaccination unsuitable.

($1 = 6.7380 Chinese yuan renminbi)

Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo Editing by Kenneth Maxwell

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