Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony yesterday stated that the Ministry of Health is considering extending the operating hours for vaccination sites in Georgetown.
This disclosure was made during the minister’s daily COVID-19 update where he stated that the health authorities are mulling that option to see whether more persons will come forward to receive a vaccine.
“We are considering and as of this weekend we will be implementing extended hours of work here in George-town, so we want to go about 8pm in the night,” he said, adding that it will begin as an experiment with the hope that more persons would come forward.
With this new development, Anthony added that persons should not wait until it was late to go to the sites to receive their vaccines, thus leaving those sites empty for the entire day until evening. “If these centres are working from 8 in the morning, we want people to start coming out from 8 in the morning. If you come early and once there isn’t a crowd it doesn’t take a long time to get the vaccination, just come, let’s do this,” Dr Anthony urged, adding that if persons need to take time off from work to go out, it is important that they get that time off to be inoculated.
The Minister informed that as of Tuesday, 172,311 persons have received their first dose of a vaccine. This number he says, accounts for approximately 35.4 per cent of the country’s adult population. As it relates to persons receiving their second dose, a total of 38,467 persons have received that second dose.
“That would be approximately 7.9% of our adult population and of those who would have received their first dose and would have come for their second dose that would account for 22.3%,” he said. Further he revealed that Region Six is still leading with the percentage of persons inoculated to date as they are now at 42 per cent of their adult population while Region Ten still lags behind at 10.7 per cent.
Anthony went on to encourage persons to go out and get their vaccines and noted that in the long run it will be good for the individuals and their work environments. He mentioned that if everyone in the work environment is vaccinated it then offers a protective effect in that specific work space.
