Rishard Khan

Since vac­ci­na­tions be­gan achiev­ing herd im­mu­ni­ty has been the goal for every coun­try

–a point in time where enough of the pop­u­la­tion is ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed against COVID-19 and when life could re­turn to some sem­blance of what it was.

How­ev­er, every coun­try’s jour­ney to this ob­jec­tive has var­ied.

Now that T&T’s vac­cine up­take has been all but stag­nat­ed, it will take the coun­try un­til 2023 to in­oc­u­late enough peo­ple to reach that goal at its cur­rent rate.

Health ex­perts have es­ti­mat­ed that be­tween 80 and 90 per cent of a coun­try’s pop­u­la­tion would need to be ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed to ful­ly ben­e­fit from herd im­mu­ni­ty.

“What is the ef­fec­tive vac­ci­na­tion rate that will help to ex­ert max­i­mum con­trol? We used to think in terms of oth­er dis­eases 85 per cent, 80 per cent. I would say the high­est we can go... which means per­haps over 90 per cent,” pub­lic health diplo­mat and epi­demi­ol­o­gist, Dr Far­ley Cleghorn told Guardian Me­dia in an in­ter­view.

How­ev­er, in T&T, on­ly rough­ly 78.6 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion (1.1 mil­lion of 1.4 mil­lion) is el­i­gi­ble to be vac­ci­nat­ed un­der the cur­rent na­tion­al vac­ci­na­tion frame­work.

An av­er­age of 973 peo­ple per day ac­cessed vac­cines over the past week. At this rate, it will take 440 days to in­oc­u­late the 429,001 peo­ple el­i­gi­ble for vac­ci­na­tion but are yet to ac­cess it as of yes­ter­day. This means the coun­try is pro­ject­ed to achieve herd im­mu­ni­ty, at the ear­li­est, Jan­u­ary 2023 if every out­stand­ing per­son re­ceives a one-shot reg­i­men. That time­line is pushed about a month back for a two-dose reg­i­men.

It’s a pro­jec­tion Cleghorn said will on­ly work against the coun­try.

“Tak­ing un­til 2023 means that you are kind of invit­ing the un­cer­tain­ty to in­crease tremen­dous­ly. If you want more cer­tain­ty in your re­open­ing strat­e­gy, you need high­er vac­ci­na­tion lev­els. That’s a fact,” Cleghorn said.

“If the Gov­ern­ment, like so many gov­ern­ments in the world wants to push for­ward and do strate­gic re­open­ing, man­aged re­open­ing, then it must guar­an­tee high­er vac­ci­na­tion rates.”

The Min­istry of Health con­firmed 345 new COVID-19 cas­es from sam­ples col­lect­ed be­tween No­vem­ber 10 to 13. It al­so record­ed eight ad­di­tion­al fa­tal­i­ties. These make 4,938 cas­es and 176 fa­tal­i­ties with­in the first two weeks of No­vem­ber. The sev­en-day rolling av­er­age now stands at 470 new cas­es per day.

Ac­tive cas­es now stand at 6,831 as on­ly 238 re­cov­ered yes­ter­day.