The National Guard is looking for centers to vaccinate Education employees

Puerto Rico National Guard (GNPR) on Thursday called for mayoral cooperation to identify seven cities that can be used as vaccination centers for teachers and teaching staff in public and private schools and universities.

These facilities are expected to be ready on or before January 18, said GNPR Adjutant General José Reyes.

The petition took place today, as part of a meeting between associate and federal mayors, with the GNPR leadership and the Department of Health.

“It is a large population, which will be a separate initiative from the other regional vaccination centers,” he said of about 42,000 employees. Department of Education (DE), as well as staff from private schools, universities and preschools.

Teaching and non-teaching staff will simultaneously vaccinate those in sub-phase 1b, which refers to approximately 400,000 people over the age of 65 and approximately 200,000 people working as first responders, such as the police, firefighters and medical emergencies.

ED nurse staff have begun appropriate training to be certified as vaccine providers by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, in English). It is about 900 health professionals who will be distributed in the seven regional centers to administer vaccines to educational staff.

The Secretary of Health, Carlos Mellado, emphasized that the opening of schools is conditioned by the staff who can be vaccinated, that the percentage of infections is adequate and how the new strain of the virus is behaving.

“We set a goal because if we don’t have a goal, we’re going to talk about opening schools (for) a whole year,” Mellado said.

Meanwhile, Secretary-General for Education Elba Aponte said they had prepared draft plans for returning to face-to-face classes. He acknowledged that in some municipalities, such as Guánica, temporary schools will have to be activated because school infrastructure has been severely damaged. He explained that of the 855 schools that DE has left open, about 140 are listed as inappropriate or partially suitable after earthquakes.

Stay tuned for the summer goal

On the other hand, Reyes was confident that the goal of reaching 80% of the vaccination of the population of Puerto Rico will be reached by this summer, as he assured that soon more vaccines will be produced and exported than the 30,000 weekly that they currently arrive in Puerto Rico ports. . “As production increases, 100,000 vaccines should arrive in Puerto Rico weekly at some point, but this will be staggered,” the general said.

He estimated that between 16 and 18 January, 70 or 80% of the first-stage health professionals were vaccinated.