A TOTAL of 5,100 doses of Gamaleya’s Sputnik V vaccine second component arrived in Cebu City on Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021, said Jeffrey Ibones, Cebu City Health Office officer-in-charge.
Ibones said the vaccines will be used to inoculate those who had been waiting for their second dose.
“We appeal to our brothers and sisters to wait for their schedule because we plan to administer all of these doses in just three days,” Ibones said on Wednesday in a mix of Cebuano and English.
He said they intend to start the inoculation of the second dose of Sputnik V vaccine at the Noah facility on Thursday, Sept. 23, while the inoculation at the University of Cebu Junior High School campus in Alcantara will begin on Friday, Sept. 24.
Ibones said by the end of the week, all of the additional Sputnik vaccines will be administered.
Aside from Sputnik V, a total of 8,000 doses of Pfizer vaccines were also allocated for Cebu City.
Ibones said they will use the Pfizer vaccines possibly starting next week.
He said they will have to discuss the guidelines for Pfizer, though, as initially, there was information from the Department of Health (DOH) that Pfizer vaccines should not be used for walk-in vaccinations.
‘Safe zone’
In a separate interview, Cebu City Emergency Operations Center (EOC) deputy chief implementer and Councilor Joel Garganera said of the 15 public and private hospitals in Cebu City, only one private hospital remains at the moderate level while the rest are already in the safe zone or within the 60 percent utilization rate.
“From the very start, this is the first time that our public hospitals are in the safety level. We are at 52.7 percent (critical care utilization rate),” Garganera said in a mix of Cebuano and English.
He attributed this to the implementation of the health protocols.
Garganera also said the city’s Covid-19 cases have dropped and for the last six days, there had been more asymptomatic than symptomatic cases.
He also said the positivity rate in Cebu City has gone down.
Of the more than 1,000 individuals tested for the Covid-19, only 66 yielded positive results, resulting in the city’s latest positivity rate of 6.26 percent, said Garganera.
The World Health Organization’s pandemic threshold for positivity rate is five percent.
He said since the situation at the city’s isolation facilities have also improved, this is the best time to recruit nurses and other medical frontliners.
Garganera said with all these developments, he is confident that the City’s quarantine status will also improve from general community quarantine (GCQ) to modified GCQ in October.
He said the EOC is also proposing to add the negative saliva test results as additional options for requirements of inbound travel to Cebu City.
They also plan to consider allowing fully vaccinated inbound travelers in Cebu City to present only their vaccination card in lieu of the present requirement — either a negative RT-PCR test result valid for 72 hours or a negative antigen test result valid for 48 hours from departure date.
This as an incentive to those who are fully vaccinated.
“We have to hear our medical experts. We are weighing all possibilities,” he said. (WBS)