CITY OF PANAMA –
PANAMA CITY (AP) – Panama’s health authorities incorporated private hospitals into the coronavirus vaccination plan since Monday, while warning that infections could skyrocket in the coming weeks after the first community case of the Delta variant in a border province with Costa Rica.
Almost a dozen private centers will join the immunization campaign in an effort to streamline the process and get more people to be inoculated as more batches of vaccines arrive, the Health Ministry reported.
Experts have long asked the authorities to involve private centers in the plan, which to date has managed to immunize half of its 4.2 million inhabitants with the first dose -mainly of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. .
The authorities are in a hurry than ever to speed up vaccination due to the fear that infections will skyrocket, mainly after the first community case of the Delta variant in a child under 14 years old was reported in the western province of Chiriquí.
Traceability teams isolated the minor’s family members and looked for other possible direct contacts.
“Let us not trust ourselves because the Delta variant is giving problems to the United States, India, Colombia, the United Kingdom,” warned the Minister of Health, Luis Francisco Sucre.
Previously, the presence of this potentially more contagious variant had only been reported in a score of travelers seeking to enter through the main international airport.
Panama adds more than 442,000 cases and 6,906 deaths from the disease.
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