Loyse Vin­cent

To­ba­go will re­ceive its first batch of COVID-19 vac­cines on Feb­ru­ary 25 and health of­fi­cials on the is­land say that there will be more than enough to pro­vide for those il­leg­i­ble on the is­land.

The in­for­ma­tion came from Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of Pri­ma­ry Care of the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty Dr Rox­anne Mitchell who made the an­nounce­ment at the Di­vi­sion of Health Well­ness and Fam­i­ly De­vel­op­ment’s COVID-19 up­date press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

Ac­cord­ing to Dr Mitchell pri­or­i­ty will be giv­en to all “cadres of health­care and front­line work­ers and per­sons over 18. Adults with pre-ex­ist­ing con­di­tions and per­sons over 60 will al­so be giv­en pri­or­i­ty.”

She said dis­tri­b­u­tion of the vac­cine will take place at the Scar­bor­ough, Rox­bor­ough and Canaan health cen­tres at a rate of 50 peo­ple per day in the ini­tial stage.

The is­land has a ca­pac­i­ty to store 30,000 vials of the vac­cine which must be stored at 2-8 de­grees Cel­sius. Each vial con­tains 10 dos­es.

“Our tar­get pop­u­la­tion if you look at the groups for ex­emp­tion, we have an adult pop­u­la­tion of 45,000 per­sons across the is­land that means at any point in time we are look­ing at 90,000 dos­es. We have set our max­i­mum tar­get with re­gards to the num­ber of vac­cines that will be rolled out even­tu­al­ly.”

The Pri­ma­ry Care Health­care man­ag­er said a vac­ci­na­tion sched­ule will be post­ed fol­lowed by the roll­out of the first and sec­ond dose of the vac­cine four­teen days lat­er. The dis­tri­b­u­tion of the vac­cine will be im­ple­ment­ed by an elec­tron­i­cal­ly man­aged ap­point­ment sys­tem to en­sure that per­sons re­ceive both the first and sec­ond dose.

“We will send out pre-reg­is­tra­tion in­for­ma­tion so that per­sons may con­tact us vis text mes­sages what app mes­sages emails and phone calls in a bid to sched­ule ap­point­ments so that per­sons can re­ceive the vac­cine.”

She said like any oth­er pre-ex­ist­ing vac­ci­na­tions, sys­tems will al­so be put in place to mon­i­tor for and treat with peo­ple who may ex­pe­ri­ence side ef­fects of the vac­cine.

“Af­ter the first vac­cine we will have per­sons wait­ing 20-30 min­utes to see what whether or not they have had an acute re­ac­tion to the vac­cine what we call im­me­di­ate acute re­ac­tion any per­son who de­vel­ops such re­ac­tions will be med­ical­ly treat­ed ac­cord­ing­ly.”

She said the is­land’s med­ical staff is cur­rent­ly be­ing re­trained on prop­er vac­ci­na­tion and cold chain pro­ce­dures to en­sure op­ti­mal ef­fi­cien­cy. Health of­fi­cials on the is­land say they hope that there will be “pub­lic uptick of the vac­cine so we can be­gin open­ing up so­cial­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly.”

Ac­cord­ing to Dr Mitchell peo­ple un­der the age of 18, preg­nant women and per­sons liv­ing with HIV/AIDS will not be vac­ci­nat­ed.

As of Feb­ru­ary 15, To­ba­go has gone 19 days with no new COVID-19 cas­es and there are al­so no ac­tive cas­es on the is­land. The is­land record­ed 155 pos­i­tive cas­es and two deaths.