WILLEMSTAD - In addition to the Sambil shopping center, the government wants to make three to four large locations suitable for the massive vaccination of the Curaçao population. The aim is 10,000 vaccinations per day.
Jerry Semper, general practitioner and medical coordinator in the vaccination program team, announced this during a recent press conference. Semper sees a drastic scaling up of the vaccination rate as "a small bright spot at the end of the tunnel".
The GP emphasizes, as before, for example, epidemiologist Dr. Izzy Gerstenbluth and immunologist Professor Ashley Duits, that vaccination is the only way out to be able to return to a more normal life.
Starting today, all people 18 years and older can register for a vaccination with the BioNTech / Pfizer vaccine. If people are vaccinated, and thus protected against the coronavirus, the number of infections will decrease and so will the number of hospital admissions.
Now people can be vaccinated at the Sambil shopping center. A long queue can be seen on social media. This is partly because people do not arrive ten minutes, but much earlier before the time of their appointment. “We vaccinated 450 people in the first two hours,” says Semper. "We can easily administer 2,000 vaccines a day there and then another 600 at the outpatient clinic in the former Sint Elisabeth Hospital (Sehos) in Otrobanda."
But that is not enough. Semper: “This is evident from the figures. We need to vaccinate many more people even faster. So we are looking for another three to four large locations. Then we come to 10,000 people a day,” says Semper.
There are enough vaccines, emphasizes the GP. A third shipment with 18,720 vaccines from the Netherlands arrived on Wednesday and a shipment of another 15,000 vaccines followed on Friday. The bottleneck here is again the staff.
Semper: “We also asked the Netherlands for help on that point. The first nurses and a doctor arrived on the island last weekend.” In order to be able to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible, it was decided to make the appointment for the second dose not after three weeks, but after six weeks.