Paraguay establishes Saturday as “E Day” to vaccinate pregnant women

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Paraguay will focus this Saturday its vaccination campaign exclusively on pregnant women over 18 years of age and 20 weeks of gestation or more, in a day that the Ministry of Health has called “Day E”, as announced Wednesday at a press conference.

Some 12,000 pregnant women have already registered in the Ministry’s database. However, so far, some 3,000 pregnant women have been vaccinated with the Moderna doses aimed at this group, according to the Expanded Program of Immunization (PAI) director, Héctor Castro.

Throughout Saturday, both the Ministry and civil society organizations will make means of transport available to pregnant women to go and get vaccinated.

For the moment, the health authorities rule out nursing mothers since “they are not within the target” and do not present comorbidities.

The Ministry also announced that on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, people aged 55 years and older would be massively vaccinated, regardless of their ID number, as it was done this weekend.

With this order, the application of biologicals to this age group began this Saturday, totaling almost 50,000 vaccinated between that day and Sunday.

Given this citizen response, the health authorities decided to repeat the strategy to continue promoting the immunization plan, which aims at reaching some 4.7 million people out of the little more than 7 million that make up its population.

Since February of this year, when the vaccination campaign began, the number of people vaccinated with at least one dose is 506,858, according to Ministry of Health data.

In this regard, Castro explained that people in the new enabled band (55-59 years) pushed older age groups to go to the vaccinators.

“Of the 50,000 people vaccinated, 25,000 corresponded to the 55-59 age group, and the other group were older people, who were attracted and taken by cars,” he said.

In previous weeks, older adults had already reported that one of their main obstacles to getting vaccinated was the lack of means to go to the authorized centers.

In the coming weeks, Castro assured that more batches of vaccines are expected, which are arriving in Paraguay mainly from international cooperation, such as the 150,000 AstraZeneca vaccines donated by Mexico, which were received early Monday morning.

In this sense, reducing the age range for the whole population will be re-evaluated this Thursday, depending on the number of people registered and the number of doses available.

The EPI director invited the population to get vaccinated to minimize infections, reaching the highest peaks since the pandemic spread in March 2020, with the number of deaths surpassing the 11,000 mark on Tuesday.

According to the latest Health report, the South American country recorded a total of 11,069 deaths, 396,149 confirmed cases, and 330,395 recovered cases.