Dr. Anthony urges vaccination for obese persons

Having obesity increases one’s risk of suffering from the more severe form of COVID-19 and as such, Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony is urging that persons with obesity get vaccinated.

Dr. Anthony, who spoke during his daily COVID-19 Update, revealed that the government has been providing nutritional and education programmes aimed at reducing the prevalence of obesity.

The government has also developed a plan to tackle vaccine hesitancy. While active COVID cases continue to decline, there has been no significant uptake in vaccination.

“So we have analysed the data that we have, we know the regions where we have the highest amount of hesitancy and therefore we are training persons in those areas to reach out to those communities,” Dr. Anthony said while noting that vaccine hesitancy has become a big problem.

Additionally, a series of workshop funded by US-AID will also be rolled out.

To date, 84.5 per cent of the adult population has received the first dose vaccine and 64.3 per cent the second dose.

The vaccine rollout in children is now at 46.2 per cent for the first dose and 33.4 per cent for the second dose. Booster shots are now at 51, 925.

There are currently 342 active COVID cases across the country.

Below is a regional breakdown of the active cases.

Region One (16 cases)

Region Two (18 cases)

Region Three (15 cases)

Region Four (141 cases)

Region Five (11 cases)

Region Six (21 cases)

Region Seven (19 cases)

Region Eight (7 cases)

Region Nine (58 cases)

Region Ten (3 cases)