Porteños over the age of 50 can be beefed up without notice. At the same time, more than a thousand people a day in the country still apply the first dose.
The vaccination campaign against Covid is about to take place two years in Argentina. A few days ago the health authorities summoned all those over 50 to receive the fifth dose. The announcement is given with a novelty in the Municipality and as part of a curiosity at a national level.
The novelty of Buenos Aires is that now you can go to authorized vaccination centers no previous turnas long as they have passed four months from the application of the fourth dose (or the second booster). In other words, it is not mandatory to use the Boti chatbot or register via the web.
The curiosity in the country is that while there are Argentines who are already applying the fifth dose, there are still some more than a thousand a day who are applying the first dose against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. During the past two months, they were on average 1.318 people who started their first program in the country.
there was also 1,452 people per day who received the second dose. While the “additional dose” was applied to 154 inhabitants per day and the first booster, 5.014 every 24 hours. The second recall averaged 5,864 daily punctures in the surveyed period.
If you add up all the vaccines applied in that period, the total was 884.162with an average of just 14,260 vaccinations per dayvery far from the levels of when Covid was a two-headed health monster: on January 7, 2021 – in full activity of Ómicron – the national record was reached with more than 571 million punctures in just one day.
There is no data yet on the number of people who received the fifth dose. The third reinforcement – or fifth dose – was decided in early November by the country’s health ministers all over 50 years old. This is the second group enabled, after peers were summoned in the first instance but only those who had received the Sinopharm vaccine in the first scheme.
Now, anyone who received the fourth dose more than four months ago will be able to request the fifth. The provinces have begun to apply it and the City of Buenos Aires has taken a different route this time: “We no longer call them. They take turns when they wantand if they go to the post office no shift they also get vaccinated,” explained a clarion sources from the Ministry of Health of Buenos Aires.
Free vaccination is a new method in the Buenos Aires area and takes place at a time when the demand for vaccines against Covid, as we have seen, dropped significantly. In the province of Buenos Aires, free vaccination had already been implemented to encourage the population to go to the vaccinator.
Those who have to apply the fifth dose in the Municipality can participate five authorized offices: Arcos 2319 (Belgrano); Circolo San Lorenzo (Avenida La Plata 1782), Order of Lawyers (Corrientes 1441); Beiró 4629 (Devoto) and Ministry of Health (Amancio Alcorta 2100). They are all administering the Moderna vaccine.
The fact that in Argentina there are still people who apply the first and second dose seems, on the one hand, a curiosity. But at the same time, in the view of the infection specialist Eduardo López, it implies a weakness. “He reveals it clearly we didn’t give a good message that people get vaccinated,” he says.
Even if analyzing the problem, the expert focuses more on the deficit of the third and fourth dose: “I think that the first dose had a coverage of 90 percent. The second, about 80%. But it is lower in the third dose and even more so in the fourth,” he says.
López adds that “with the Ómicron variant, having three doses is the minimum moderately protected. But to improve protection, the fourth is needed, especially in those over 50 and those who have an underlying disease or are immunosuppressed “.
When asked why people almost stopped getting vaccinated in the second half of 2022, López believes that “it hasn’t been done enough propaganda. And the percentages in the case of boys are even lower. It would take a lot of effort to do this turn that situation around”.
If it is true that the perception of danger with Covid has decreased, it was partly possible thanks to vaccination. And in the transit that goes from the emergency of the past to the control of the present, there seems to be a new challenge: to convince the population of the importance of getting vaccinated even in this post-pandemic climate.
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