The Municipal Health Department of Rio de Janeiro (SMS) expects to receive new doses of vaccines against covid-19 on Thursday, thus being able to resume on Friday (4) the calendar of application in children from 6 years of age. age. Childhood vaccination was suspended yesterday (31) due to lack of doses.
Today it would be the turn of boys aged 7 and over, but there is only availability to care for children with comorbidities, between 5 and 11 years old. According to SMS, 100,000 doses of CoronaVac should arrive on Thursday to vaccinate children aged 6 and over.
According to the Secretary of Health, Daniel Soranz, the biggest concern at the moment is the low adherence to childhood vaccination, which reached only 39% of children aged 8 to 11 years, public already served by the campaign.
“We really need parents to take their children to be vaccinated. The pediatric vaccine is safe, it protects against serious forms of covid-19, so here’s our recommendation for parents. This is our main concern at the moment, we have a new variant, it behaves more lightly in vaccinated people, so we need to vaccinate our children as soon as possible”, he said.
So far, 156,700 children aged 5 to 11 years have been vaccinated against covid-19 with the first dose, which is equivalent to 28% of the public estimated by the Health Department for this age group. In the range between 12 and 19 years old, only 1,600 people are missing the first dose and 19% have not yet taken the second.
To serve the 5-year-old public, next week, a new shipment of pediatric Pfizer will be required, the only vaccine approved by the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) for application at that age.
A batch of 1.8 million pediatric doses of Pfizer arrived in the country yesterday and will be distributed to states by the Ministry of Health throughout the week. According to the ministry, the state of Rio de Janeiro has already received 491,700 doses of pediatric vaccines against covid-19 and will have another 400,000 in the coming days.
THE Brazil Agency contacted the State Department of Health to find out if there are pediatric doses in stock for distribution to municipalities and is awaiting a return.
omicron
According to Soranz, since last week the city of Rio has observed a decrease in the registration of new cases of covid-19, which is reflected in the demand for care in the hospital network and also in hospitalizations.
“We see a sustained drop in the last two weeks in the number of people looking for health units with flu syndrome, it dropped around 30%. Also a reduction in new requests for hospital admissions for covid-19, which is accompanied by a reduction in the positivity rate of the tests, which was around 41% and today is at 24% of tests carried out, a very important drop. Also a drop in the number of hospitalized patients, which was around 950 and today we have less than 600”, concluded the secretary.
Despite the 181% increase in reported cases in January 2022, hospitalizations and deaths from covid-19 this year are doing well. below visa in January 2021.
