MANILA, Philippines — A total of 288,577 tourism workers have already been vaccinated against COVID-19, an official of the Department of Tourism (DOT) said Wednesday.
This is 89% of the DOT’s target of vaccinating 329,000 tourism workers in the country, Tourism Undersecretary Woodrow Maquiling Jr. said.
The regions with the most vaccinated tourism workers are the Cordillera Administrative Region and Metro Manila, Maquiling said, with 44,108 tourism workers in Metro Manila already being fully vaccinated.
However, with the rise of COVID-19 cases and the threat of the Omicron variant, Maquiling said the department is pushing for booster shots for tourism workers, especially workers in hotels being used as quarantine or isolation facilities for returning overseas Filipinos.
He said so far 55% of hotel workers or around 13,5000 have already received their booster shots.
“The campaign is sustained naman to all regional offices especially in NCR and in areas na tumataas ang cases natin at major ports natin, like in Davao and Cebu among others para lahat ng mga hotel workers at frontliners are given with booster shots,” Maquiling said in a Laging Handa public briefing.
(The campaign is sustained in all regional offices, especially in NCR and in areas with rising numbers of COVID-19 cases as well as in major ports so that all hotel workers and tourism frontliners are given booster shots.)
Over 4.7 million Filipinos have so far received their COVID-19 booster shots, but this number remains “low,” vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. earlier said.
READ: 4.7 million Filipinos have received booster shots, but that’s still a ‘low’ number – Galvez