Health authorities in Bohol could start to simultaneously inoculate against COVID-19 the remaining frontliners who have yet to get their first dose of the jab, the elderly and other lower-rung sectors in the priority list when more vaccines arrive, a health official announced.
Front-line health workers and senior citizens are categorized under A1 and A2, respectively, in the National Inter-Agency Task Force’s (IATF) COVID-19 vaccination priority list with the nationwide inoculation drive still mainly covering the former.
“Nindot g’yud og mo abot ang daghang bakuna kay dunay standing memo ang DOH (Department of Health) na pwede mag simultaneous vaccination. If given the proper number of available vaccines, madungan ang senior citizens, and those with comorbidities [A3] and the A4 sector,” said Bohol IATF spokesperson Dr. Yul Lopez.
The province earlier listed down over 150,000 senior citizens who expressed willingness to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
The BIATF requested for doses for each one of them through the DOH.
According to Lopez, only a “few” frontliners in Bohol remained unvaccinated.
He said most of those who have yet to get inoculated were barangay health workers in various municipalities.
“Instructed nato ang tanang lungsod, na if ma kompleto na ang pagpamakuna sa frontliners they can go to step two, ang atong A2 priority,” he added.
However, Lopez admitted that it is beyond the province’s control as to when more vaccines arrive in the Philippines and distributed to the country’s various localities.
There has been a noted stall in the arrival of vaccines into the country as nations scramble to get their hands on the jabs in a bid to contain the spread of the highly contagious viral disease.
Lopez said the province has so far received 53,880 doses of the COVID-19 vaccines from the DOH.
Majority of the jabs at 48,740 doses were from China-based drugmaker Sinovac while the rest at 5,140 doses were from British-Swede pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.
The latest batch of jabs to arrive in Bohol were 8,000 doses of Sinovac vaccines which were shipped to Tubigon last week. (R. Tutas)