While in Medellín, Envigado, Caldas, La Estrella and Sabaneta they celebrated the measure of dismantling the mask in public spaces for reaching 70% of their population with a complete vaccination schedule, in the rest of the municipalities of Aburrá the announcement did not go down well.
Authorities from Bello and Copacabana, for example, maintain that the figures provided by the Ministry of Health do not do justice to the actual data on the vaccinated population and that their municipalities were excluded from the measure of not wearing face masks without taking into account that Medellín and Envigado monopolized the reports of complete schemes.
“A high percentage of the population of Bello works in Medellín and the south of Aburrá and that boosted their vaccination there. It also happened that EPS assigned an appointment to the Bellanita population in municipalities such as Envigado, and we have a situation – that we had even already informed the Government – of IPS that vaccinated in Bello but uploaded the data in Medellín, ”explains Secretary of Health Juan Felipe Pineda .
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The president of Itagüí, José Fernando Escobar, gave a specific name to the EPS issue suggested by Pineda, and points out that Sura users ended up vaccinated in Envigado as part of the strategy contemplated by the Government of Antioquia, and that in that order of ideas the dynamics of vaccination must be understood in a metropolitan context, without ignoring municipal responsibility.
Pointing in the same direction, the mayor of Copacabana, Héctor Monsalve, assures that the way in which the information was collected from the vaccinated did not anticipate that several municipalities in the Aburrá would end up “sacrificed” regarding their management and coverage.
“We are requesting the Government of Antioquia to review and adjust this information that allows us to have more real coverage figures for each municipality, but it is somewhat difficult because at the time of making the records, there were many information gaps regarding the place. of residence of those vaccinated”, he laments.
That is why the president’s request is clear: that the determination announced a week ago be unified and be a metropolitan measure.
“The coverage of the population of Aburrá is more than 74%. If the problem is not a lack of vaccination but rather failures in the registry, the most sensible thing is to cover the entire metropolitan area with the measure, ”he insists and points out that it is a request that they had already been raising before the Government long before the announcement. .
The Undersecretary of Public Health of Antioquia, Natalia Montoya, assured that the Government is working with the National Government on a strategy that allows for a massive upload of information, acknowledging that there have been failures in the crossing of data updates.
However, the gaps in the records are not exclusively responsible for the coverage deficit of the municipalities. At least in the case of Bello, the Secretary of Health admits that lags and their causes have been identified in specific sectors.
In neighborhoods such as Paris, Maruchenga, Los Sauces (community 1); La Camila (Commune 10), Santa Rita (Commune 11), and particularly in sectors such as Nuevo Jesuralén, which is going through one of the most critical phenomena of urban expansion in the country, public order problems have made the vaccination plan difficult, points out Pineda.
But both the authorities of Bello and of the other municipalities assure that far from crossing their arms they will intensify strategies such as door-to-door immunization, a measure that the Vaccination Oversight Office in Antioquia had been requesting for several months due to the stagnation of the goals.
From the Government they point out that the priority now is a departmental crusade to increase coverage among those under 19 years of age, with crews that will go look at homes and schools for the more than 400,000 children and young people in this age range who have not yet been protects against viruses.
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