Around 31,000 persons have so far received COVID-19 vaccines and the administration of second doses to those who were in the initial batches is expected to begin this week.
This was revealed by advisor to the Minister of Health, Dr. Leslie Ramsammy, who was at the time delivering remarks after receiving 24,000 doses of vaccines from COVAX on Monday.
“Thirty-one thousand Guyanese citizens and persons resident in Guyana have received their first dose of vaccine already and in fact during this week we are going to begin administering second doses to some of those who received their first dose early,” he noted.
He also mentioned that teams were on the ground in Region Six yesterday conducting the vaccination of shut-ins.
Guyana began COVID-19 inoculation on February 11th, with the first category of persons being frontline healthcare workers, who were given a dose of the Oxford Astra-Zeneca vaccine. Authorities were able to begin the immunisation programme just days after receiving 3,000 doses from the Government of Barbados through a donation.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ramsammy noted that the Ministry is preparing to receive some 200,000 doses of vaccines that were procured by the government and he reiterated the authorities’ intentions of vaccinating 10,000 persons per day.
With this addition of some 224,000 vaccines, Ramsammy said that the government hopes to inoculate over 200,000 persons before the end of April and that this will be a massive undertaking. “We are going to over the next few days give more information to the citizens of this country in terms of where they can get their vaccine in the coming days,” the advisor said.
