Costa Rica had run out of covine-19 vaccines since the beginning of December.
The Costa Rican Ministry of Health reported this week that it received a donation of 22,000 doses of covine vaccines donated by the Government of Panama and called on the population to use them.
These are 22,000 doses of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company, of which 20,000 correspond to vaccines for people over 12 years of age, 1,000 for the population from 6 months to 4 years of age, and 1,000 doses for children from 5 to 11 years of age.
“The Ministry of Health reminds the population of the importance of completing vaccination schemes and urges them to go to health centers,” the Ministry of Health said in a statement.
This donation is made after the media published in recent weeks that the country had run out of vaccines against the covine-19 since the beginning of December.
The most recent data from the Ministry of Health indicates that in epidemiological week 1 of 2024, from 30 December 2023 to 6 January 2024, 306 cases of covine-19, 47 people hospitalized and 3 deaths were recorded.
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Authorities have also confirmed the movement of the JN.1 variant since last December.
In 2023 the highest number of covid-19 infections occurred in week 1 of the year with 5,645, then there was another peak in week 8 with 5,595.
From then on, it began to reduce to fewer than 300 cases on average in the last 20 weeks of the year.
The most recent data published by the Costa Rican Social Security Fund indicate that 90.1 per cent of the population of Costa Rica has a dose of the covid-19 vaccine.
In addition, 84.6 % has two doses, but the percentage drops to 57.8 per cent at third dose, 21.3 per cent at fourth dose and 0.5 per cent at a fifth dose.
This article has been translated from the original which first appeared in Pan America