Af­ter a dis­as­trous at­tempt at a first-come, first-serve vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme for el­der­ly peo­ple last week, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh has an­nounced a new vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme.

Speak­ing dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre in St Ann’s, on Sat­ur­day, Deyals­ingh said the new pro­gramme will be aimed at se­nior cit­i­zens over 65 years old and will be­gin on Wednes­day.

The new pro­gramme will be car­ried out at 36 health cen­tres run by five Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties (RHAs), Deyals­ingh said.

“Per­sons 65 and over, we are go­ing to tar­get you be­cause we have in our RHA data­bas­es per­sons who are 65 and over, our hos­pi­tal clin­ics, we do have some peo­ple 65 and over al­ready on our data­base wait­ing for an ap­point­ment, we will be con­tact­ing you and ask­ing you to come to the sites,” the Min­is­ter said.

He said el­der­ly peo­ple are no longer re­quired to vis­it health cen­tres and line up or be in­con­ve­nienced.

Deyals­ingh said this new pro­gramme will al­so tar­get the res­i­dents of homes for the el­der­ly across the coun­try. He said to date, 750 res­i­dents and care­tak­ers at these homes have al­ready been vac­ci­nat­ed.

The pro­gramme will al­so tar­get shut-ins.

“Start­ing from Wednes­day, we are go­ing to tar­get the shut-ins, we are go­ing to you, in your com­mu­ni­ties, in your homes, via our dis­trict health vis­i­tor pro­gramme, in this ad­just­ed process, we are com­ing to you, a sig­nif­i­cant turn­around from what ex­ist­ed,” he said.

How­ev­er, the num­ber of vac­cines avail­able in this tranch is lim­it­ed as Deyals­ingh said on­ly 20,000 dos­es of the Sinopharm vac­cine will be al­lo­cat­ed at this time.

Those 20,000 vac­cines come from a ship­ment of 200,000 Sinopharm vac­cines ex­pect­ed to be de­liv­ered in T&T on Mon­day af­ter­noon.

Be­cause the Sinopharm vac­cine re­quires pa­tients to re­ceive two dos­es to be con­sid­ered ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, 150,000 of that ship­ment will be held to guar­an­tee sec­ond dos­es for those who have al­ready re­ceived their first jabs.

From the re­main­ing 50,000, Deyals­ingh said the Su­per­mar­ket As­so­ci­a­tion will be al­lo­cat­ed 5,000 dos­es, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion will be al­lo­cat­ed 4,500 dos­es, To­ba­go will be al­lo­cat­ed 3,000 dos­es, the con­struc­tion sec­tor will be al­lo­cat­ed 5,000, bankers will be al­lo­cat­ed 2,000, CEPEP will be al­lo­cat­ed 2,500 dos­es, pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers will be al­lo­cat­ed 5,000 dos­es and the Di­a­betes As­so­ci­a­tion will be al­lo­cat­ed 3,000 dos­es for its mem­bers who are over 65.

Deyals­ingh said the Min­istry’s cur­rent vac­ci­na­tion goal by Ju­ly is to have 188,900 adults ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed. He said this is Goal One and is sub­ject to change as more vac­cines be­come avail­able.

As of 4 pm yes­ter­day, Deyals­ingh said 150,692 peo­ple have re­ceived their first dose of the vac­cine and 9,843 peo­ple have been ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed.

The Min­is­ter said in the next two to three weeks, a new IT plat­form to ac­com­mo­date the Min­istry’s ap­point­ment sys­tem should be launched.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley al­so sought to give as­sur­ance to those el­der­ly cit­i­zens who do not re­ceive calls to get vac­ci­nat­ed in the com­ing days.

He said, “I am sure we have many more than 20,000 in that cat­e­go­ry, so un­der­stand from now, it is not every­body in the cat­e­go­ry that is go­ing to get be­cause we just don’t have enough vac­cines but on this go around with the 20,000, we will have a smoother, clear­er arrange­ment and for those who didn’t get ser­viced in this group, in the next group, rest as­sured that we will come back to it again be­cause it is gov­erned by the avail­abil­i­ty of the vac­cines.”

CMO: Of­fi­cials to wait and see if there is a COVID spike from mass gath­er­ings

Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram, mean­while, said health of­fi­cials will have to wait and see if there is a COVID-19 spike from the three days of mass gath­er­ings this week as el­der­ly cit­i­zens across the coun­try flood­ed health cen­tres try­ing to get vac­ci­nat­ed.

Paras­ram was re­spond­ing to ques­tions from Guardian Me­dia.

“When­ev­er you have a gath­er­ing of peo­ple, where so­cial dis­tanc­ing and mask­ing is not there, there is a po­ten­tial for spread, it re­quires naïve peo­ple, mean­ing peo­ple who are not in­fect­ed, it re­quires peo­ple who are in­fect­ed as well,” Paras­ram said.

He said there are many un­known fac­tors but added that when he looked at the pho­tos from those gath­er­ings, most peo­ple were wear­ing their masks.

How­ev­er, he said health of­fi­cials will have to wait to see what hap­pens in two weeks.

“Again it is spo­radic gath­er­ings in small lo­cal­i­ties, it’s not all over the coun­try, it was in par­tic­u­lar health cen­tres that it oc­curred so we will wait the time and see what hap­pens but again, with the mask-wear­ing, it should mit­i­gate some of the spread that could have po­ten­tial­ly oc­curred,” Paras­ram said.