Minister of Public Health doesn’t plan restrictions during Christmas
The Minister of Public Health, Daniel Rivera, said that during the Christmas festivities no new restrictive measures will be added.
“Thanks to the medical work, thanks to the people who were vaccinated, we are going to have a calm Christmas”, said the official.
Rivera reiterated his call to continue with the vaccination, especially in relation to the third anticovid dose and in the population over 18 years of age.
The official indicated that the inoculation with the booster dose, or third dose, the protection to people increases “40 times”.
On the contrary, the recently sworn president of the Dominican Medical College, Dr. Rufino Senén Caba, believes that the authorities should establish limits for Christmas, to avoid infections.
“Many measures had to be taken, to be more punitive in the use of masks, in the requirement of the vaccination card and start with all of them from house to house”, specified the internist and intensivist.
Regarding the estimates of some health specialists, among them Dr. José Rafael Yunen, who point out that between January and February of next year a new wave of infections will emerge, Rivera explained that every eight weeks the virus is activated.
Rivera exemplified that just as the Delta variant was presented and was “well controlled, we have to be vaccinated for the new variants that may come.”
Yunen affirmed that the Dominican Republic has all the conditions to foresee the emergence of a new wave of the Covid-19 virus for the months of January and February of next year, according to the predictive models and the behavior of the pandemic.
The critical care specialist bases his warning on the fact that more than half of the vaccinated people in the country have more than six months of having received the second dose, whose effectiveness decreases after that time and the population is still very low with third or booster dose.