The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was scheduled to arrive on the 17th, but has been postponed and should only happen next Thursday, May 20, when the Region will receive the first 7,000 out of a total of 42,000 administration doses. that will be used in the bedridden population.
In addition to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Madeira continues to receive vaccines from Astrazeneca and should receive, in June, 13 thermal cases from Pfizer, an “extremely high” number that “will allow the Region to maintain this rate of 3,000 to 4,000 vaccines per day that we achieved very recently ”, assured the regional secretary of Health and Civil Protection, Pedro Ramos, who spoke on the sidelines of the signing of the program contract that aims to support the dynamization of the 3rd curricular year of the Integrated Master in Medicine .
To the population, even those who are already vaccinated, Pedro Ramos calls for rapid antigen tests made available by the Regional Government free of charge every 15 days because “we cannot let our guard down in relation to the evolution of the pandemic, so that numbers do not increase again ”.
Asked by journalists about the increase in the number of tourists arriving in Madeira and the possible reinforcement of testing teams at the airport, Pedro Ramos considers that this should not be necessary, since tourists will arrive “with a different sanitary condition”. “Many of them are already vaccinated, many of them are recovered and many have to be tested because it is also a requirement in their countries,” he said.
On a day when the Region recorded a slight increase in cases of covid-19 – 26 new infections -, Pedro Ramos believes that the
number “will always be very variable”, an that despite being more than two dozen new cases, the number number of hospitalizations dropped, with five patients in normal hospitalization and only one in the intensive care unit.