During today’s COVID19 briefing, the Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony confirmed that within the first quarter of this year, Guyana will be receiving some special equipment which will be used to digitize the COVID19 vaccination cards.
Dr Anthony started that, “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 specialized 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”.
In making those remarks, Dr Anthony revealed that the physical registers that contain all COVID19 vaccinated persons have already been collected from across the country and that a team has been working on transforming them into a digital format.
He went on to say that, “we have a special team within the ministry that is working on digitization. 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.”
It is hoped that the initiative would allow easier access to a person’s vaccination status whilst combatting issues related to illegally purchased and fraudulent vaccination cards.
Dr Anthony also revealed that on Wednesday, the Minister of Health recorded its highest ever vaccination uptake figure with over 3700 persons taking the jab on that day alone. Dr Anthony said, “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.”
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.
