Coronavirus: First 48,000 doses of AstraZeneca arrive in Uruguay through the Covax mechanism

The first 48,000 vaccines from the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical AstraZeneca, which Uruguay receives within the Covax mechanism of the World Health Organization (WHO), arrived this Sunday at Uruguay and in the next few hours the country’s vaccination commission will decide who will receive it.

At 18:13 (21:13 GMT), flight QT4091 of the Colombian company Avianca, from Bogotá, landed at the Carrasco International Airport, on the outskirts of Montevideo.

With the arrival of the AstraZeneca vaccines, there are already three laboratories that have arrived with doses to Uruguay, because it is already being inoculated with the American Pfizer and the Chinese Coronavac since the beginning of March in the South American country.

This is the first batch of the 1.5 million doses that Uruguay has insured within the Covax mechanism and the rest are expected to arrive in different stages in the coming weeks.

Although this vaccine has raised questions, mainly in Europe due to a few cases of thrombosis in people to whom it had been administered, the Uruguayan Minister of Public Health, Daniel Salinas, put on his Twitter account that from his portfolio they are calm because they update “All the evidence in order to provide the maximum guarantees.”

The Coronavac vaccine was initially administered to teaching personnel, police, firefighters, military personnel, and workers of the Institute for Children and Adolescents (INAU), but during Tourism Week (Holy Week) it was applied to the general population between 18 and 70 years of age.

For its part, the doses of Pfizer -for their greater efficiency- are inoculated to health personnel, people over 80 years of age and the Secretary of the Presidency, Álvaro Delgado, announced on his Twitter that in the coming days the same will be done with the population between 70 and 80.

So far, 717,787 people have been inoculated with the first dose of Coronavac or Pfizer, while 67,972 have already received the second dose. In this way, there are already 20.47% of the country with the first part of the vaccination and 1.94% completely immunized.

Since the health emergency was decreed in the country, Uruguay has accumulated 113,904 positive cases of Coronavirus (23,798 active), 384 in intensive care and 1,071 people have already lost their lives due to this disease.

Currently, the entire country is in the red, according to the Harvard risk index, and the border departments with Brazil, Cerro Largo and Rivera continue to be the most affected with 171.26 and 149.21, respectively, while the country registers a average of 65.43 new cases in the last seven days.