IF the second dose of vaccines arrives within March and City Hall maintains or picks up its pace in vaccinating the city’s health care workers, the senior citizens of Cagayan de Oro City may next be in line for vaccination by April.
“Assuming that the next batch of vaccines arrives in March and we are targeting to fully vaccinate all health care frontliners (this month), hopefully at the rate we’re going we will finish in two weeks. So I’m excited (and looking forward to being vaccinated),” Mayor Oscar Moreno said in today’s City Hall press briefing.
Citing a City Health Office (CHO) chart, Mayor Moreno said about 6,359 health care out of the initial 9,436 target frontliners in Cagayan de Oro City were vaccinated as of March 17 or about 67.39 percent.
“But if you look at the number of vaccines the city used based on the number of vaccines delivered to the city, our average is 98.94 percent or nearly 100 percent which is good,” Moreno said.
Moreno also cited a speech by vaccine czar Carlito Galvez during the launching of Northern Mindanao Medical Center’s ceremonial vaccination program which disclosed that about 1.4 million doses of CoronaVac vaccine will arrive on the third week of March.
As of Wednesday, an additional 955 persons were added to the list by the City Health Insurance Office to include emergency personnel such as disinfection teams of the City General Services Office and the City Disaster Risk Reduction Management Department based on Moreno’s request.
Acting City Health Officer Dr. Lorraine Nery said City Hall started vaccination of its health care frontliners last March 8 or three days after the Department of Health regional office launched the regionwide vaccination.
“We at the City Health cluster met and we agreed to fast-track our data collection and validation of target vaccine (senior) recipients,” Dr. Nery said.
Dr. Nery said their data validators are making household visits and they tapped students from various schools and the city’s scholars to double-check and encode the names of an estimated 112,961 senior citizens in the city. Based on City Hall’s initial estimates, it would take them 16 to 21 days or at least three weeks to vaccinate the city’s senior citizens.
“We’re also finding ways to ensure that the recipients will arrive on the vaccination site on schedule as well as other challenges,” Dr. Nery said.
Moreno said the challenges in vaccinating the seniors such as mobility are formidable, but eventually can be overcome. (Stephen Capillas of the City Information Office)
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