Dear Editor,
This letter is a short statistical follow up to your very short article of August 1, 2022 with the headline “Health Ministry inching towards administering one million COVID vaccines.” ‘Inching’ was an interesting word to have used. I’m not sure that it captures just how painfully slow the march to 1,000,000 jabs has become for the Ministry of Health (MOH). The Honourable Minister of Health has stated that in the first twelve months of the vaccination programme 850,735 jabs (2,313 per day) were administered. In the six plus months since, it has administered 84,735 jabs (437 per day). As the charts below show, vaccination numbers have fallen from 2019 per day in January to 233 per day in August. [And, as if to underscore this precipitous drop, in a recent Covid-19 Update (August 23: 2:44 mark) a graphic stated simply “205 doses given within the last 24 hours”]
At the leisurely pace at which Guyanese are getting vaccinated the one millionth dose will be administered two months after the second anniversary of the first dose on February 11, 2021. I close with the words of the Honourable Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony: “I think for a lot of people, they believe that COVID-19 is over and people are being very complacent, but you do have one of the more contagious strains of the omicron virus that is circulating, that is the B.A5. Even if you had a previous infection with omicron or one of the other variants, you can get reinfected with B.A5, so we are still not out of the woods.” (DPI/Aug.9)
Yours faithfully,
Ellis Dee
