As Guyana has expanded its COVID-19 vaccination programme to all adults, the Minister of Health recently revealed that it would be difficult to say exactly how many healthcare workers were inoculated to date.
Dr Frank Anthony made this disclosure to Stabroek News recently on the sidelines of an event after being asked approximately how many frontline and healthcare workers have received their vaccines.
“That’s a difficult question as of now because we are not checking people’s profession and therefore it’s hard to answer,” Anthony said.
“At the beginning when we started vaccination because it was predominantly nurses and doctors and healthcare workers we would have had a figure,” he added while pointing out that it is hard to say what percentage of those persons vaccinated now are healthcare workers.
Guyana’s inoculation programme began on February 11th after the government had received a donation of 3,000 AstraZeneca shots from the government of Barbados.
Prior to the arrival of those shots, the health minister had said that around 22,000 frontline workers were expected to make up the first recipients of COVID-19 vaccines in the country.
According to previous reports, the last count of frontline workers being inoculated prior to the expansion of the programme to include to elderly persons was 1,852 frontline workers as of late February.
