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Almost everyone is now special enough to get the vaccine.
With the province dropping the age of eligibility to anyone over the age of 24 on Tuesday and to age 18 on Wednesday it takes the wind out of the sails of the calls for prioritization of teachers and other groups for vaccination.
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The daily calls for different groups for prioritization began to border on asinine. From police to firefighters to transit drivers, there was an argument for just about every special interest group to be bumped to the front of the line.
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The NDP is calling on the provincial government to take immediate action for teachers and school support that they say are “on the brink” due to COVID-19 by vaccinating all frontline school staff, increasing in-school mental health supports for staff and students and certifying education graduates to fill staffing shortages.
“Schools need to remain open but this government needed to vaccinate teachers weeks ago so that we could keep our schools open,” said NDP Education Critic Nello Altomare on Monday at the Manitoba Legislature. “We’re starting to see a direct result of not getting people vaccinated. We’re having school divisions like Evergreen close. We’re having Pembina Trails having to close some schools and now Louis Riel School Division. This is happening and this baked-in stuff that is going to be happening from now until the next few weeks could have been completely avoided had we vaccinated all the adults in our schools.”
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With some concern over vaccine supply, the province is continuing to roll-out mass COVID-19 vaccinations, adding supersites in the coming weeks, changing vaccine eligibility and adding staff.
Manitoba is getting its seventh vaccination supersite in Steinbach in May, representatives from Manitoba’s Vaccine Implementation Task Force (VITF) announced in a press conference on Wednesday. The site will be able to administer more than 420 daily vaccinations depending on supply.
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As of Wednesday, around 300,000 vaccines were administered in Manitoba, with 458,410 doses delivered to the province. This includes 284,310 doses of Pfizer vaccine, 90,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine and 84,100 doses of AstraZeneca (AZ). Manitoba expects to receive 28,400 doses of Moderna vaccine this week.
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The provincial government released data on Monday on race, ethnicity and Indigeneity (REI) information from people who test positive for COVID-19 showing that like in other parts of the world infections in Manitoba are not evenly distributed by population groups.
Collected since May 1 of last year, the data shows that despite only making up 13% of the province’s population, Indigenous and First Nations people made up 17% of Manitoba’s positive cases. Meanwhile, Filipino people showed the greatest disparity in population size burden of COVID-19 with a 12% positivity rate while having only 7% of the population. Filipino women are slightly more affected than men.