The coun­try has en­tered in­to the In­fluen­za (Flu) sea­son but as the Min­istry of Health rolled out its vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve for this virus, which is run­ning si­mul­ta­ne­ous to its COVID-19 im­mu­niza­tion dri­ve, there can be some un­cer­tain­ty of how these shots should be tak­en.

The Min­is­ter of Health, Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, sought to lend some clar­i­ty on Sat­ur­day.

Some­one who has not re­ceived the COVID or flu shot:

Some­one who has not re­ceived a COVID-19 vac­cine as yet can take the flu shot. How­ev­er, they will need to wait two weeks be­fore tak­ing a COVID-19 jab.

Some­one who re­ceived two dos­es of a COVID-19 vac­cine:

Some­one who re­ceived both dos­es of a COVID-19 vac­cine or com­plet­ed their reg­i­men will just need to wait two weeks af­ter re­ceiv­ing the last shot to be able to take the flu shot.

Some­one who re­ceived one dose of a COVID-19 Vac­cine:

Some­one who re­ceived one dose of a COVID-19 vac­cine will need to wait un­til two weeks af­ter tak­ing the fi­nal dose be­fore a flu shot can be ad­min­is­tered. For in­stance, some­one will need to wait two weeks af­ter their sec­ond shot of Pfiz­er, As­traZeneca or Sinopharm. Some­one who re­ceived the one-shot John­son and John­son vac­cine will just need to wait two weeks af­ter the ini­tial jab.

Who should get the flu shot?

The flu shot is avail­able to any­one who wants to re­ceive it, how­ev­er, as Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh ex­plained, some cat­e­gories of peo­ple should en­sure that they get it. These are health­care work­ers, preg­nant women, those over 60 es­pe­cial­ly those with non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases (hy­per­ten­sion, di­a­betes, etc), chil­dren over six months, the im­muno­com­pro­mised, those with chron­ic res­pi­ra­to­ry ill­ness­es (asth­ma, COPD), and all front­line work­ers.

Where is it avail­able?

At all 109 health cen­tres across the coun­try.

T&T's flu shot

The flu vac­cines be­ing ad­min­is­tered dur­ing this sea­son is a quadri­va­lent one, ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh. This means it's ef­fec­tive against two dif­fer­ent strains of In­fluen­za A and two strains of In­fluen­za B.

Preva­lence of in­fluen­za in T&T

The preva­lence of the flu in T&T has wained over the pan­dem­ic years. This is at­trib­uted to two main fac­tors. First­ly the bor­ders have been closed since March 23, 2020, which lim­it­ed the im­por­ta­tion of the virus in­to the coun­try due to trav­el. Sec­ond­ly, the in­fluen­za virus is spread in a sim­i­lar way to SARS-CoV-2, the coro­n­avirus that caus­es COVID-19. This means the pro­to­cols em­ployed to pro­tect the pop­u­la­tion against COVID-19 al­so worked to pro­tect against the flu. In 2017/18, there were 4,598 flu cas­es with sev­en deaths. In 2018/19, there were 2,854 flu cas­es with 44 deaths. In 2019/20, there were just 858 sus­pect­ed flu cas­es with no deaths record­ed. In 2020/21 there were just 115 sus­pect­ed cas­es with no deaths record­ed.