With 36 unvaccinated Guyanese dying from COVID-19 over the last seven days, Minister of Health Dr. Frank Anthony on Monday made an appeal for persons to ensure they take at least one of the four vaccines being offered to adults across the country.
Since the first detected case in Guyana on March 11, 2020 the country has recorded a total of 687 deaths with four in the last 24 hours. This also means that 62 COVID-19 deaths have been recorded in less than the first two weeks of September alone.
Dr. Anthony said most of these deaths are persons who were unvaccinated and would have suffered from severe symptoms of the virus.
“In the last week the 36 deaths were all unvaccinated and it begs the question why people are not getting vaccinated.
“I want to say again that they need to get vaccinated because if not they will get the more severe form of the virus,” the Health Minister said during his daily COVID-19 update.
Of the 687 deaths, some were 384 males with the remaining 303 being females.
Head of Medical Services and Cardiology at the Georgetown Public Hospital, Dr. Mahenda Carpen has also pointed out that a majority of Guyana’s COVID-19 deaths have been recorded among patients who were not vaccinated.
In fact, according to statistics he provided on his Facebook page on Sunday night, 81 per cent of the patients who died in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in August were not vaccinated; 16 per cent of those patients had only received one dose of their COVID-19 vaccine.
And, three per cent of those people who died were fully vaccinated. The News Room reported that the patients who were fully vaccinated but died had other severe, life-threatening diseases that contributed to their death.
To date, a total of 334, 333 adults received the first dose of one of the COVID vaccines being offered in Guyana; it accounts for 65.2% of the adult population.
Meanwhile, some 173, 999 persons have received both doses of the vaccine, representing 33.9% of the adult population being fully vaccinated.
“We are still far away from herd immunity and we need to move this 33% further up.
“A lot of people who are ending up in hospital are the unvaccinated and people need to go out and get their vaccines… too many unvaccinated persons are getting the severe form of the disease,” Dr. Anthony added.
The government started administering the Pfizer vaccines to adolescents just over a week ago. So far a total of 18, 299 persons received the first dose with the second dose to be administered within 21 days.
The total number of persons vaccinated between the12 to 17 age group accounts for 25.1% of adolescents in Guyana.
“I want to encourage persons to bring their children out to get vaccinated… you just need proof of age and parental consent,” Dr. Anthony reminded.
