Health personnel who work in nursing homes will begin to be vaccinated against COVID-19 next Tuesday in Ottawa and Toronto, two of the main cities in Canada, with the serum of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, reported this December 10th, The authorities.
The province of Ontario, the largest and most populous in the country, announced that on December 14th, it will receive a small number of doses of the vaccine and that vaccination will begin on Tuesday in two hospitals in Toronto and Ottawa of nursing home staff.
Yesterday, the Canadian health authorities authorized the use of Pfizer’s vaccine and on Friday the pharmaceutical company is scheduled to send a first batch of 30,000 doses from Belgium. The vaccines are scheduled to arrive in the country on Monday.
The Canadian federal government has announced that the vaccines will be distributed proportionally to the population of the provinces and expects to receive 249,000 doses of Pfizer before the end of the year.
This amount will allow to immunize 124,500 people, since the vaccine needs to be administered in two doses in a period of three weeks.
Ontario Head of Government Doug Ford said in a statement that “Ontario is ready to receive COVID-19 vaccines as soon as they are available.”
Although Ontario, which has a population of 14.5 million people, has not specified how many doses it will receive on Monday, it is expected to be around 6,000.
Ontario is the second Canadian province worst hit by the coronavirus: this Friday it reported 1,983 new cases of COVID-19 and the authorities have warned that, if the same trend continues, the number of cases could skyrocket to 6,500 a day by the end of the month .
The worsening situation has forced Ontario to decree a partial lockdown in Toronto and the Peel region, due to the high number of cases, higher than that registered during the first wave of the pandemic.
In parallel, the number of people hospitalized in Ontario for COVID-19 today reached a record number of 829 people, of which 228 are in Intensive Care Units (ICU).
So far, 3,871 people have died in Ontario from the disease.
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