National Guard is looking for centers to vaccinate education workers

The National Guard of Puerto Rico (GNPR) today, Thursday, requested the cooperation of mayors to identify seven cities that could be used as vaccination centers for teachers and teaching staff of public and private schools, as well as universities.

These facilities are expected to be ready on or before January 18, GNPR General Adjutant José Reyes said.

The petition took place today, as part of a meeting between the associate and federated mayors, with the GNPR leadership and the health department.

“It is a large population, which will be a separate initiative from the other regional vaccination centers,” he said of about 42,000 employees of the Education department (DE), in addition to staff from private schools, universities and kindergartens.

Teaching and non-teaching staff are simultaneously vaccinating those who are part of sub-phase 1b, which involves about 400,000 people over the age of 65 and about 200,000 people who work as first responders, such as police, fire and emergency medical.

ED nursing staff began corresponding training to become a vaccine provider through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, in English). About 900 health workers will be distributed in the seven regional centers to administer vaccines to educators.

The designated health minister, Carlos Mellado, emphasized that the opening of schools depends on the vaccination of staff, that the infection rate is appropriate and how the new strain of the virus behaves.

“We have proposed a goal, because if we don’t have a goal, we’re going to talk about opening schools (for) an entire year,” Mellado said.

Meanwhile, the designated Education Minister, Elba Aponte, indicated that they had prepared design plans for the return to face-to-face classes. He acknowledged that in some municipalities, such as Guánica, temporary schools have to be used because the infrastructure of the schools has been seriously damaged. He explained that of the 855 schools the DE left open, about 140 were declared unfit or partially fit after the earthquakes.

Stick to the goal for summer

On the other hand, Reyes trusted that the goal of reaching 80% vaccination of the population of Puerto Rico will be achieved by this summer, as he assured that more vaccines will be produced and exported soon than the 30,000 weekly vaccinations currently in place in Puerto Rican ports arrive. . “As production increases, at some point 100,000 vaccines should arrive in Puerto Rico every week, but that will be staggered,” said the general.

He estimated that between January 16 and January 18, 70 or 80% vaccination of first-stage health workers was achieved.