The minister recommends the use of the mask and the booster vaccine due to the covid-19 rebound in Cuba

“Even if these are not alarming figures (…) and at this moment 98.6% of the vaccinated population has completed their vaccination program, it is essential to strengthen many of the measures”, reads the title of a report presented on Tuesday at the government and published on the portfolio website.

In this sense, he specified that “526 new patients have been confirmed since mid-November, with an average diagnosis of 13 cases per day. Cuba due to COVID-19″

Portal recommended distancing and protective measures such as “the use of nasobuco (mask) and hand washing”.

“It was decided to start applying booster doses with our vaccines to pregnant women in the last trimester of pregnancy” and to administer “a new booster dose to the population at risk and those over 70”, he added.

With a population of 11.2 million, to date Cuba has recorded 1,111,918 patients since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, of which 8,530 died and 1,103,209 recovered, according to official data.

After applying the doses of the three Cuban vaccines – Abdala, Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus -, more than 10.03 million people have the complete vaccination schedule and 8.6 million have received booster doses.

However, despite their proven efficacy, Cuban vaccines are still awaiting approval by the World Health Organization (WHO), although they are already being applied in several countries such as Mexico, Iran and Vietnam.

The head of the state group BioCubaFarma, Eduardo Martínez, recently told the official Granma newspaper that “the delay is due to the visit of WHO experts to the factories where the vaccines are produced.”

He indicated that the new biotech complex Mariel, which opened last January, has delays with its start-up.

This is due “to the refusal of various banks to carry out the transfer operation” due to the restrictions imposed by the US trade embargo.

cb/lu