Tobago aims to vaccinate 10,000 by next week

THA Secretary of Health, Wellness and Family Development Tracy Davidson-Celestine said her division's target is for the island to have at least 10,000 people with one covid19 vaccine jab in their arms by the end of next week.

At the THA Division of Health, Wellness and Family Development’s news briefing on Thursday, she said: “We are aiming to hit the 10,000 mark hopefully by the next week, as we continue to receive vaccines from Central Government.”

The division's health update on Friday revealed 8,299 people received one jab while 1,598 people have been administered their two doses.

Davdson-Celestine implored those who are yet to be vaccinated, to register for their jabs.

General manager of Primary Care Services at the Tobago Regional Health Authority (TRHA) Dr Roxanne Mitchell said 52 per cent of the vaccines administered so far were the AstraZeneca while Sinopharm accounted for the next 48 per cent.

Mitchell thanked the public for their response to the pre-registration as it assists with scheduling and procurement, among other things. She reported that the number of people pre-registered for vaccines as of Thursday was 12,116.

“There are a significant number that are not pre-registering in Tobago. We’ve established some targets and one of the targets we looked at was to vaccinate 36,000 persons – we are at 21.7 per cent of that.”

She said the target of approximately 500 vaccines per day was set just over one week ago, adding that of Wednesday, this figure was exceeded.

Covid19 Response Team member Dr Anthony Thompson presented data showing that the island’s covid19 statistics are seeing some promising changes.

“In terms of active cases, the seven-day average seems to be plateauing and this is an encouraging sign suggesting that we may be making progress and turning a corner. It's further supported by the seven-day average for new cases which last week rebounded a bit, but this week seems to be trending downwards and again, further supported by sample positivity rates which this week is down from 20 per cent to 15 per cent.

"So all the signs seems to be pretty encouraging. All in all, the picture looks encouraging and it's hopefully welcomed news for a team that is working really hard and for a public that is becoming more and more co-operative as the weeks have gone by.”

He reminded fully vaccinated people that they can still contract covid19, but the vaccine makes them less likely to become seriously ill and provides even greater protection against fatality.

A more integrated system, he said, will be put in place for the collection and linking of data to be able to provide more comprehensive statistics. He said to date, all vaccinated people in Tobago who later contracted covid19 had only received a single dose of the two-shot vaccines.