Guyana should be ready for COVID-19 vaccine by mid-January – Health Minister

…30 new COVID-19 cases recorded

Several countries across the world have already begun rolling out vaccines for the dreaded COVID-19, and Guyana is not going to be left behind according to Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony.
The Minister, during his daily COVID-19 brief, related that Guyana is in the process of currently creating the space and acquiring equipment to make it ready to receive vaccines by mid-January 2021.
“We have to increase the physical space to store the vaccines and we have started that process. We have done the evaluation; our engineers have gone out to each of these sites in the regions and based on that we are now planning some expansion. We are hoping that by mid-January a lot of this physical space would be created. We are going to do some tendering for these projects by this week/next week so that we can have the physical space ready,” Dr Anthony related.
He noted that on December 11 the United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted approval to Pfizer for the rolling out of its COVID-19 vaccines – shortly after it was granted approval for distribution in the United Kingdom. The other competitor – Moderna is expected to be granted approval when its documentation comes up for review by the FDA on December 21.
The Health Minister added that with vaccines on the horizon, all the doom and gloom of the past nine months can now be overshadowed by the ray of hope they bring.
“In terms of our preparation here, we have started to prepare our cold chain system and the cold chain is vaccines you would have to keep them at a certain temperature, generally most vaccines that we been using would be between 2 and 8 degree Celsius and so we are accustomed to a system that operates within this range,” he said.
He noted that while there are several vaccine storage facilities in Guyana, the public health system does not have the facilities to store vaccines below -20 degree Celsius.
“This current system that we have in place is not going to be enough. We need extra space for COVID-19 vaccines and some of the COVID-19 vaccines coming out on the market they have special temperature requirements. So, for example with the Pfizer vaccine you have to store them at minus 70 degrees Celsius and for the Moderna vaccines it is at minus 20 (degrees Celsius) so while we do have some freezers in the public health system that runs at minus 20, we don’t have any minus 70 freezers,” he related.
“We have also identified a number of suppliers for freezers. So, we are going out to get some of the minus 70 degrees freezers and some minus 20 freezers as well and this would complement the existing cold chain that we have and so by doing this we are expanding the range of our existing cold chain so we would be able to get any vaccines whether it is minus 70 to 2 which covers the range of vaccines being talked about,” Dr Anthony added.
However, he noted that a lot of the countries are going after the minus 70 degrees Celsius freezers so there is an anticipated shortage. He added that they are also looking at procuring cold storage trucks to transport the vaccines to the various regions for distribution.

New cases
On Tuesday, Guyana recorded 30 new cases, which takes the total confirmed positive cases to date to 5973. Of this amount, 5144 persons have recovered. In the daily dashboard update it was noted that nine persons are in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), 43 in institutional isolation, 621 in home isolation, and 17 in institutional quarantine. Some 34,498 persons have been tested for the virus to date. (G2)