(Trinidad Express) At least 1 million Trinidadians need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity from COVID-19.
This is according to the Chief Medical Officer Roshan Parasram who was speaking this morning at a COVID-19 news conference. He urged citizens to take the vaccine.
Parasram said that vaccines are “among the most important public health interventions in history.” adding that if uptake is great, herd immunity can be achieved.
Approximately 70 per cent of the population need to be vaccinated to meet this goal which he said would protect more vulnerable subsets who may not be able to receive the vaccine.
“We are looking at 70 per cent of the population in general just bearing in mind that most of the COVID-19 vaccines are available to persons over 18 meaning that we already have segment of the population who can’t be vaccinated, children, persons who are pregnant, breastfeeding, persons who have severe allergic reactions to components of the vaccines. All the rest of us need to come forward and have the vaccine to protect those in orange. When we do our calculations, we have approximately 1 million people who can take the vaccine and we are asking everyone to come forward and have your COVID vaccine while it is available,” he said.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), herd immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune. This is achieved through vaccination or through previous infection. The latter, the WHO says is unethical and may lead to unnecessary infections, suffering and death.
Vaccination, it says, lowers the opportunities for the virus to spread without making the population sick.
“To safely achieve herd immunity against COVID-19, a substantial proportion of a population would need to be vaccinated, lowering the overall amount of virus able to spread in the whole population,” says the WHO.
Parasram said that the Government has been noting the progress and decreasing level of virus cases in the United Kingdom over the past few months. He said in countries where mass vaccinations continue, such as the UK, COVID-19 cases have decreased significantly. As such he called on citizens to participate in the vaccination drive.
“The UK has 60 million people as we have been looking at the UK in terms of their infections over the COVID-19 epidemic we see that their cases have gone significantly down since the introduction of their vaccines They had started the vaccinations in the 18 of December 2020 and what we are seeing now is their cases have gone considerably down there were able to vaccinate approximately 121, 000 persons per day. Even at their peak they were able to vaccinate 500,000 per day in the UK. What it led to was a considerable reduction in the number of cases. At this point 67.1 per cent of the adult population has one dose and 33.9 per cent has two doses. We are seeing right around our corner, St Kitts is doing very well,” he said.
