CEBU CITY, Philippines – The Department of Health in Central Visayas (DOH-7) is eyeing to begin the vaccination against COVID-19 for the elderly and individuals with comorbidities in mid-April.
This after the regional health office, as of March 29, posted a 51 percent success rate in inoculating healthcare workers who are the government’s top priority in its COVID-19 vaccination drive.
As of March 29, there were a total of 117,493 healthcare workers classified under A1 in the national government’s Philippine National Deployment and Vaccination Plan for COVID-19 vaccines.
This means that based on the data from the Visayas COVID-19 Vaccination Operations Center (VVOC), 59, 962 of them have already been administered with their first dose of the vaccine while 57,531 are yet to receive their shots.
“We are positive we can finish vaccinating all our medical frontline health workers… so that we can start with subgroup A2 and that would be our senior citizens together persons with co-morbidities,” said DOH-7 spokesperson Dr. Mary Jean Loreche.
“And we are very upbeat that we might be starting the rollout for subgroup A2 this April… Maybe between the first and second week of April,” she added.
Central Visayas has already received close to 120,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines as of March 30. These included the recent batch of Sinovac vaccines delivered to DOH-7 last March 30.
The region began its COVID-19 vaccination drive last March 4, starting with healthcare workers from Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC).
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/ dcb