CEBU CITY — The number of fully vaccinated individuals in Cebu on Tuesday breached the 1 million mark but health officials said it might take two more years for the province to achieve “herd immunity” from COVID-19 due to the low turnout of people in vaccination centers in several towns.
“If we compute the 2.5 million more to vaccinate and with the current output that we have, we might need two years to achieve the herd immunity,” Dr. Mary Jean Loreche, spokesperson for the Visayas Vaccination Operations Center, said in a statement.
Herd immunity happens when a large part of the population is immune to a specific disease.
In Cebu, around 3.5 million people are eligible to receive free COVID-19 vaccines from the national government. In order to reach herd immunity, about 70 percent or approximately 2.5 million people must be vaccinated.
As of October 4, a total of 1,000,608 people in Cebu had already been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
Protection
Loreche encouraged Cebuanos to get inoculated to protect themselves from severe infections and hospitalization.
“We will now try to encourage all to be vaccinated and we can start on ‘ring immunization’ as our way of handling this. Meaning, we [will] vaccinate more areas with low number of cases,” she said.
“Should the entire 3.5 million [people] be difficult for us [to vaccinate], then we need 1.5 million more to safely have that population protection,” she added.
If Cebu wants to achieve herd immunity before the end of 2021, it should administer at least 19,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines daily, health officials said.
Cebu island’s daily average of doses administered ranges from 5,500 to 14,000.
Aside from those implemented by local governments in Cebu, the vaccination program here is also simultaneously done by the private sector-led Project Balik Buhay.