Legazpi City now has storage facility for Covid vaccines

READY A cold storage warehouse in Legazpi City is inspected on Sunday by Mayor Noel Rosal and is now ready to store the coronavirus vaccines that the city plans to buy for its residents. —MAR ARGUELLES

LEGAZPI CITY—This capital city of Albay province now has a cold storage facility for coronavirus vaccines that it intends to purchase for its residents, becoming the first local government in Bicol region to ensure that it can properly keep the lifesaving drugs.

Legazpi partnered with Glacier Liberty Refrigeration Services Corp. to use the firm’s 3,500-square-meter refrigarated warehouse in Barangay Bonot for the vaccines that were expected to arrive within the first half of this year.

Mayor Noel Rosal, who inspected the place on Sunday, said that except for the Pfizer Bio­Ntech vaccine, which requires minus 70 degrees Celsius storage, the vaccines manufactured by the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, India’s Covovac, China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac, and Russia’s Gamaleya-Sputnik, could be kept there.

The facility’s refrigeration capacity can go as low as minus 25 degrees and store up to 10 million doses.

The city government and Glacier Liberty signed a memorandum of understanding on Monday to formalize their partnership. Rosal said the company would be paid P85 to P90 a pallet per day for refrigeration and storage services.

Each pallet can hold up to 50 boxes of vaccines, the mayor said.

City Hall had earlier earmarked P200 million to purchase 150,000 doses of vaccines to cover 136,000 residents, or 90 percent of Legazpi’s population of 200,000.

It would also launch quick response (QR) codes in preparation for the mass vaccination in 70 villages, said Jesus Chito Baldo, the QR program director. Residents may register and get their QR codes at the city’s online platform.

As of Sunday, Legazpi had 15 active COVID-19 cases. It had so far recorded 428 cases since March last year, with 17 deaths. —MAR ARGUELLES AND MICHAEL JAUCIAN INQ