Chief Medical Officer, Dr Roshan Parasram said the Ministry of Health’s focus at this time, is to finish vaccinating the group identified in phase one of the programme.
This includes health care workers, those over 60 and people under 60 with comorbidities.
Speaking at the Ministry’s media conference on Monday, Dr Parasram said by keeping the focus on completing the vaccination of this group, there should be a decrease in deaths and hospitalisation of people in that category.
He said, “When we look at where the deaths have been occurring in the country you’ll find that 84.8 per cent of the deaths, so far due to Covid19, are persons over 50, and below 50, most of the time, are those with comorbidities.”
Parasram added, “We want to get all the persons in phase one completed in the shortest possible period of time so we would see that reduction in hospitalisation and deaths, even if the infection continues to rise.”
The programme’s focus will then shift to getting as many people as possible vaccinated as soon as possible.
The CMO said said 97 per cent of the country remains naive in terms of immunisation, but added “We need to get that down as quickly as we can by using immunisation at a population level…”
We expect as the number of cases decreases and the number of immunised persons increases, we will have a decrease in the number of cases and of course deaths.”
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