Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony, M.P. said Guyana continues to record fewer COVID-19 hospitalisations, while announcing that there is currently no patient in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
“Fortunately, over the last two weeks or so we’ve not seen much hospitalisation and in the ICU for the last couple of days we have not had any patients,” he said during Thursday’s COVID-19 update.
To this end, he is urging people to get vaccinated. He explained that while adults have been coming forward to get vaccinated, more still needs to be done to ensure adolescents are immunised.
Dr. Anthony noted that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is necessary to prevent persons from contracting a severe form of the disease which will require hospitalisation.
Meanwhile, the health minister said there is still some level of vaccine hesitancy in Regions Two, Seven, Eight, and Ten.
“Up to now the vaccination rates in these regions remain relatively low. Among the people who are not vaccinated there, unfortunately, I do think there are some healthcare workers who have not been vaccinated.”
Additionally, the health minister is reminded that testing for Covid-19 at government institutions is free. These tests include antigen testing, genexpert machine tests and PCR testing.
He is encouraging persons experiencing symptoms of the COVID-19 to get tested.“We have a number of testing sites across the country where we would collect the samples and we would do the testing.”
“And the government’s service has been free, and we focus primarily on persons who would like to be tested because they believe they have signs and symptoms of COVID,” the minister added.
As of today, Thursday, April 21, 85.7 per cent of the adult population took the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine while 66 per cent is fully vaccinated. In terms of the 12 to 17 age group, 47.2 per cent is inoculated with the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and 34.6 per cent of this population is fully immunised.
