Chile exceeds 4 million vaccinated against the coronavirus, 21% of its total population

Chile this Friday exceeded 4 million vaccinated against coronavirus covid-19 since the mass immunization campaign began on February 3, reaching more than 21% of the country’s total population with a first dose.

“United we are capable of moving mountains. Today we exceed 4 million people vaccinated. We will continue to work tirelessly to protect the health and life of all. This great achievement is everyone’s credit, but the pandemic is not over. We must continue to take care of each other “, wrote the country’s president, Sebastián Piñera, on his Twitter account.

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Specifically, the Ministry of Health reported that 4,031,812 people have already received a dose of vaccine against covid-19, of which 2,608,017 are people over 60 years of age.

“This figure is important because from the beginning we set ourselves to vaccinate older people who are the ones who are hospitalized the most and have the most fatality in intensive treatment units”, Health Minister Enrique Paris said in a public statement.

The authority also highlighted that to date 535,600 people have received the two doses of the vaccine, thus completing the immunization scheme against covid-19.

“It is a figure that fills us with pride”, emphasized the minister, who highlighted “the privileged position” reached by Chile worldwide in regard to the vaccination process, which leads in Latin America and in which only Israel, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States surpass it Worldwide.

“This reflects the work of primary care and hospital officials, mayors and the Chilean population who are enthusiastically attending to get vaccinated”, Paris pointed out.

The vaccination campaign deployed by Chilean health institutions has been based on the extensive network of primary care distributed throughout a territory of more than 4,200 kilometers.

The other key factor is the skill in negotiating the vaccines, which has served to guarantee 35 million doses, of which 10 million are from Pfizer-BioNTech, another 10 million from Sinovac and the rest from AstraZeneca, Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) and the Covax platform, promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) to guarantee universal access to the eventual vaccine.

Of all of them, 8.3 million doses have already arrived in Chile and another 2 million from Sinovac will arrive next Monday.

The Chilean government’s plan involves immunizing the entire population at risk (about 5 million people) in the first quarter of 2021 and the rest of the target population (15 million) in the first six months of the year.

PANDEMIC CONTINUES ON THE RISE

In parallel, the coronavirus continues to add infections and claim lives and the Ministry of Health reported 5,325 new cases of covid-19 this Friday, which is the highest number since the toughest stage of the pandemic, in June 2020, when the contagions came to touch the 7,000.

The authorities consider that this data, which broke with the average of 4,000 daily infections that had been registered, responds to the effects of the southern summer holidays, which in February lived its central month.

Adding up today’s report, the total number of people who have been diagnosed with covid-19 in Chile reached 845,450, of which 27,317 are in the active stage and 796,791 are recovered cases.

Regarding deaths, in the last 24 hours there were 90 deaths from causes associated with covid-19, raising the total number of deaths to 20,928 throughout the country.