–Health Minister says, as over 3,700 persons take COVID-19 ‘jab’ in 24 hours

MINISTER of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony, has said that his ministry is expecting the delivery of some special equipment by the end of the first quarter of this year, to begin the process of digitising COVID-19 vaccination cards.

“Since last year, we have been working with UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] to buy some of the equipment that is necessary, the computers, the specialised printers and so forth, so we expect that we will get delivery of those special equipment to print the new cards within the first quarter of this year,” Minister Anthony said during Thursday’s edition of the daily COVID-9 update.

Dr. Anthony said most of the physical registers have already been procured from across the country and a team has begun working on transforming them into the digital format.

“We have a special team within the ministry that is working on the digitisation. We have got most of the physical registers, and we are now putting that in a digital format. A lot of the work has already been completed,” the minister related.

This initiative will allow easier access to information about a person’s vaccination status and also address the concern of illegal purchases of vaccination cards.

Meanwhile, it appears as though more persons are recognising the importance of the COVID-19 vaccines, as the ministry recorded its highest number of vaccinations per day, with over 3,000 persons taking the ‘jab,’ on Wednesday.

“So, yesterday I think we broke a record in terms of vaccination, we were able to administer 3,706 vaccines and that then gradually increased some of our totals,” he said.

In terms of booster doses, 22,747 doses have been administered. Of this number 16,291 persons received the Pfizer vaccine; 4,564 persons received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine while 1,892 persons took Sinopharm as their booster dose. (DPI)