Following the Executive meeting of the Department of Health on Friday it was announced that flu vaccine and Coronavirus booster jabs will get underway on Wednesday for all those who are aged 70 years or over.
The aim is to complete the procedure by 15 November so that the program can move on to those people between 65 and 69 years old, those in risk group and essential personnel. Vaccinations for all health personnel will take place in their respective health centres starting on 2 November.
Health personnel will begin to be vaccinated against influenza in their respective centres on November 2.
The method by which people will be called will be different from the covid campaign. It will no longer be by strict order of birth or exclusively through calls or messages to the mobile. Health wants to attract as many people as possible in order to complete the vaccination program in the shortest possible time.
In order to achieve this, during this coming week the Health website will be enabled as will the health app so that patients can book an appointment for the double vaccination at their health centres.
For now, online appointments can only be requested by those over 70 years of age. At the same time, health centres will receive Public Health lists so that they can call patients. Anyone who is unable to travel to their health centre will be vaccinated at home.
The third doses against covid will be given using the Pfizer vaccine, except for those people who received the first two doses of Moderna, who will receive the same again.
Initially, the double vaccination campaign was going to begin on Monday, October 25, but problems with the centralised purchase of flu vaccines have caused a slight delay in this start.
For the 65 to 69-year-old group and those people who are at risk, when compared to last year, vaccinations will be a month later.
“In theory there should be no risk due to this delay, since traditionally flu does not reach the province of Alicante until the end of December or the beginning of January. So it is not expected that it will arrive any earlier,” says Juan Francisco Navarro, president of the Valencian Society of Preventive Medicine.
In terms of the Covid emergency levels the province of Alicante has moved to emergency level 2 in the graduated system introduced by the Ministry of Health. Although the cumulative incidence remains low, there are other indicators that have worsened in recent days.
One of them is traceability, that is, how many of the new cases of covid for which origin of the contagion is known. At the moment only 48% of cases are traceable, well below the 80% recommended by experts.
Also, the seven-day incidence in people over 65 years of age is high and, finally, the situation in ICUs, now has 10% of beds occupied by covid patients.
As a result of this increase in the level of alert, nursing homes in the Alicante province will not be able to allow physical contact between residents and family members.
In terms of new cases, there were just 80 new cases of the virus in the Alicante province on Friday, 41 fewer than Thursday, while during the last seven days there were two deaths, an 81 and a 97 year old.
