Covid-19 jabs ‘green corridors’ could continue, Bulgaria Health Minister says
“Green corridors” where coronavirus jabs are available for all comers could continue after the current 10-day holiday period that will end on May 9, Bulgaria’s outgoing Health Minister Kostadin Angelov told the weekly news briefing of the Covid-19 HQ on May 6.
Angelov said that any decision on “green corridors” will depend on the availability of vaccine doses beyond those needed to administer a second jab.
He hailed the new single-day vaccination record of 32 482 jabs administered on May 5, the bulk of which were second doses, but re-iterated that the goal was to reach 50 000 jabs a day in the month of May.
“We will soon have one million vaccinated Bulgarians, which, counting those who have recovered [from Covid-19], will give us more than one and a half million people protected [from infection],” Angelov said.
He said that data showed a stable downward trend of new infections and of the number of people in hospitals, including intensive care units.
Bulgaria’s medicines agency head Bogdan Kirilov said that the European Medicines Agency was evaluating the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine with a view to approve its use to young people aged 12 to 17.
The first results from clinical trials were expected in June and a decision in that sense could be made soon after, he said.
Todor Kantardzhiev, head of the National Centre for Infectious and Parasitic Diseases, said that the coronavirus genome sequencing tests, carried out by the centre on a fraction of the positive PCR samples every week, showed that the UK variant of Covid-19 was “100 per cent present”.
He said that no instances of the Brazilian, South African or Indian variants had been detected in Bulgaria, but warned that such cases were present in other European countries.
Kantardzhiev said that people entering Bulgaria from those countries should exercise caution and self-isolate for 10 days, avoiding large-scale gatherings.
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