Suriname will start vaccinating the population on Tuesday. Healthcare workers who have direct contact with corona patients are the first to turn.
The vaccination campaign will kick off at the Academic Hospital in Paramaribo, the Surinamese Ministry of Health announced on Tuesday.
At the start of the campaign, Suriname has a thousand doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. This allows five hundred employees to be vaccinated. This batch of vaccines was a gift from friendly Barbados.
It is not yet clear when Suriname will receive the next batch of vaccines. In the coming period, a total of more than 400,000 people will have to be vaccinated.
In order to be able to purchase even more vaccines, the COVID-19 Vaccine Fund Suriname (CVFS) was launched last week, with the aim of collecting money from companies and other organizations for the purchase of vaccines. The Surinamese government has already secured some of the necessary vaccines by paying a deposit to the supplier, but that is not enough.
Number of positive tests is decreasing rapidly, several relaxations
Meanwhile, the number of positive corona tests in the country is rapidly declining. Only one infection was reported on Monday.
Suriname has a total of nearly nine thousand confirmed corona infections since the start of the outbreak. There are still 23 people with the virus in the hospitals, six of whom are in intensive care.
Due to the declining figures, all schools may open their doors again this week. The primary schools had already opened last week.
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