LAST Thursday’s videoconferenced meeting that Health Minister Dr Hala Zayed held with provincial health commissioners nationwide to follow up the progress of vaccinating people against Covid-19 reflected the steadiness and coherence that have characterised of the state’s approach to responding to the pandemic since its global outbreak. As a top-level measure, holding that meeting pointed to the government’s keenness to ensure that its overall policy regulating both the therapeutic and preventive procedures is being appropriately pursued at the level of governorates, that senior provincial health directors are actively following up the situation and that the government is constantly assessing the entire scene of therapeutic and preventive measures. That day saw the Health Ministry sending 350,000 text messages to people who filed for getting anti-Covid vaccines, advising them to appear before designated centres to get injected with the vaccine, at the same time, the Health Ministry extended the daily working hours at those centres to 09.00pm to enable citizens to receive the vaccines at convenience.
That meeting gained further value and significance with the Health Ministry deciding to dispatch specialised convoys to workplaces to register vaccine applicants and give them the doses for free. These convoys, as Health Ministry spokesman Khaled Megahid explained in a statement following that meeting, will reach out to factories, schools, universities, government offices, banks and sites of construction and equipping works of national projects. As such, these convoys are expected to ensure the vastest and speediest reach-out of the state’s drive to get the largest possible segments of the public vaccinated against the Covid-10 pandemic. Needless to say, action in this direction helps bring the spread of the virus under control and ultimately promotes public health, especially the huge and multiple efforts that have been made over the past few years to upgrade and bolster the functioning of the national health sector through a chain of campaigns and presidential initiatives to eliminate HVC, spread control over non-communicable diseases and push forward the new comprehensive health insurance scheme.
Of special significance in this context was Minister Zayed’s appeal to senior citizens to seize of the opportunity of the deployment of such convoys in registering for vaccination and getting the vaccine shots, especially now that the working hours have been extended to make it possible for senior citizens to do the job past heat peak times. While these convoys will serve as vaccination outposts, the chain of 539 vaccination centres spread in all governorates continue to offer their services to the public as well as to foreigners living in Egypt. Turning the vaccine reach-out expanding drive all the more complementary, the Health Ministry has designated 126 centres to vaccinate would-be travellers and issue them smart, secured certificates denoting travel eligibility. It’s indeed an integrated drive that involves almost all the components deemed necessary for maintaining the consistency of the state’s overall policy on upgrading the national health sector’s potentials and performance.
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