Vaccine uptake slows down

3033309

In the past week, T&T administered only 4,500 doses of vaccines and not the 10,000 to 15,000 expected.

Minister of Health Terrence Deyalsingh said that the country was not where it needed to be with vaccinations.

“We are not happy with the vaccination figures,” he said at Saturday’s Ministry of Health COVID-19 update.

“By now, we should have been touching 500,000 first-dose. We are 415, 826, 30 per cent of the population,” he said.

Deyalsingh said that the Regional Health Authorities are now going door-to-door to help bolster the number of vaccinated people.

“If we take up these vaccines now, in five weeks we should be probably having to report no more deaths because you get vaccinated now, you wait three weeks for your second dose and two weeks to pass. That is how easy it is to bring down our mortality figures and our ICU and HDU figures,” he said.

Last week the country reportedly received a gift of 82,030 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines from Canada. Deyalsingh said some 31,330 of those vaccines are expiring at the end of August.

“So we have just under two to three weeks to get these into arms,” Deyalsingh said.

He said 50,700 would expire at the end of October.

“So it fits in basically in the eight to 12-week window that we have between AstraZeneca first dose and second dose,” he said.

However, the minister said Saturday that 84,000 vaccines will be allocated to mass sites throughout the country.

This is what he said:

*Tobago will receive 4,000 of these vaccines and are expected to begin their rollout on Tuesday or Wednesday.

The Trinidad sites begin their rollout tomorrow.

*The Paddock at the Queen’s Park Savannah has been allocated 3,000 vaccines, while the NAPA site has also been allocated 3,000 vaccines.

*The UTT site in Chaguanas has been allocated 5,000 doses, and the Racquet Centre, El Socorro, has been allocated 4,000 doses.

*The Sangre Grande Civic Centre has been given 2,000 doses, and the Mayaro Regional Sporting Complex has been allocated 1,000 doses.

*The site at SAPA has been given 10,000 doses, while the Divali Nagar site and the Ato Boldon site have been allocated 5,000 doses each.