COVID jabs reach 1,000 a day

The national immunisation campaign against COVID-19 is picking up considerable pace, reaching a rate of about 1,000 vaccinations a day within a week of the jab’s arrival, the Minister of Health announced during Wednesday’s COVID-19 update.

Lt. Co. Jeffrey Bostic revealed that though there was scepticism among some people about taking the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, the number of people being vaccinated daily was continuing to rise.

He said: “Pursuing the national vaccination programme to prioritize and protect our frontline workers, [and] persons with NCDs [non-communicable diseases], and seniors, I am pleased to report that having started to test our systems last Wednesday with the vaccination of 30 people, and increasing our numbers daily, as of yesterday evening February 16th, Barbados has vaccinated 6,665 persons. That is nearly 1,000 people a day.”

But the Minister of Health advised that people should only visit vaccination centres currently if they are over 70, or between the ages of 18 and 69. After it was brought to the attention of health officials that persons who were not a part of categories were turning up to be vaccinated, Bostic said that such practices will not be tolerated going forward.

He told the nation: “I’ve instructed the polyclinics and the testing centres, that immediately, the only persons who should be coming to those installations for vaccines, are persons who are 70 and over, persons who are below 70 and over 16, and who have chronic NCDs. And those persons will receive a telephone call after registering from the Ministry of Health and Wellness, and the Vaccine Committee and those persons will be told exactly where and when to go to receive their vaccines.”

Though not currently operational, Lt Col Bostic also said that school and private medical institutions are being considered as centres in the vaccination roll-out, in order to release some of the pressure on the island’s polyclinics.

He told journalists: “There are some schools and other facilities that are on the cards, and the vaccination coordinating team, Major [David] Clarke, [and] Dr. [Elizabeth] Ferdinand, they are in charge of the process and they are doing it on a daily basis, putting things in place so that those facilities can be up and running.

“I can say yes, we have coordinated, we have requested, we have asked assistance from BAMP [Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners] private doctors, from the BNA [Barbados Nurses’ Association] we’ve had some assistance, but we need more. I would ask those entities to kindly speak to their membership so that we can have more personnel available to open those facilities, to take some of the strain off of the polyclinics. Not all of the polyclinics will be involved in the exercise going forward because we still have to maintain other public health areas.”
(SB)