45% of Population Fully Vaccinated

As of last Friday, fifty percent of the population has received at least one dose of the four vaccines available in country, while forty-five percent are fully vaccinated.  Doctor Diaz-Musa says the ministry is strategically going into the communities to get vaccination numbers up.

Dr. Melissa Diaz-Musa

Dr. Melissa Diaz-Musa, Deputy Regional Health Manager, Central Health Region

“Our numbers keep going up and we are pleased with that, but we would like to for these numbers to go up faster, especially over the last two to three weeks, we’ve seen that the numbers have stagnated a little bit – at this point between forty-four, forty-five percent – and we need this higher and we need it to go higher very quickly. We sat together as a team, all the regional managers and deputy regional managers, and we came up with some strategies for all districts and for the Belize District, we just finished that exercise where we had fifteen additional persons helping us, going house-to-house in certain areas in the Belize District. We focused a lot on the rural areas so we were at Hattieville, we went to Maskall, we were in Ladyville, Lord’s Bank and then we also did downtown. We did the Antelope Street Extension, we were in the Gungulung area and Victoria Street as well. So we looked at different areas and we find that at this point, it is helping to go street by street or house by house because there are many people that are willing to get vaccinated once we go in, do the health education aspect and the nurse is there with the vaccine. Right there and then we were able to get quite a number of persons vaccinated in the last week. So what we are trying to do is improve accessibility to the vaccines.”

Doctor Diaz-Musa says that booster shots are available for fully vaccinated persons five to six months after your second dose or two months after taking the Johnson and Johnson.