The regional police of North Sumatra Province has deployed special teams to carry out door-to-door COVID-19 vaccinations to scale up vaccine coverage, especially among older adults.
“North Sumatra Police has intensified vaccinations by visiting residents directly at their homes in order to reach the COVID-19 vaccination target,” North Sumatra Police’s public relations chief, Senior Commissioner Police Hadi Wahyudi, said here on Tuesday.
Twenty-one vaccinator teams have been deployed on motorcycles to carry out door-to-door vaccinations in 21 sub-districts in Medan City, he informed.
He said that the teams have been deployed in order to bump up vaccination coverage among older adults in the Medan city area to 60 percent.
COVID-19 vaccinations for older adults have been accelerated, especially amid the Omicron spread in Indonesia, because they are considered vulnerable to contracting the virus, he explained.
“Vaccinations for older adults are targeted to finish in two days. We hope all the vaccines that the vaccinators bring can be administered. If the vaccines run out, vaccine stock will be delivered to the team on the field,” Wahyudi asserted.
In a bid to boost community immunity against COVID-19, the Indonesian government launched a nationwide vaccination program on January 13, 2021. President Joko Widodo was the first vaccine recipient under the program.
According to data provided by the Health Ministry, as of January 11, 2022, nearly 171,445,921 Indonesians have received their first COVID-19 jab, while 117,650,566 have been fully vaccinated against the virus.
North Sumatra is targeting to vaccinate as many as 11,419,559 residents.
As per the ministry’s data, so far, 9,033,671 residents in the province or 79.11 percent of the targeted recipients have been immunized with the first dose, while 5,904,176 or 51.7 percent of the targeted recipients have obtained the second dose.
Source: Antara News