Four hun­dred of the 2,000 vac­cines gift­ed to T&T from Bar­ba­dos have al­ready been ad­min­is­tered be­tween Wednes­day and Fri­day in Trinidad.

Each per­son is ex­pect­ed to re­ceive two shots. The sec­ond batch of 600 peo­ple is ex­pect­ed to be in­oc­u­lat­ed with­in the next few days.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, speak­ing at the Min­istry's COVID-19 up­date on Sat­ur­day gave that in­for­ma­tion.

"So the to­tal fig­ure vac­ci­nat­ed from Wednes­day to yes­ter­day af­ter­noon is 400. That's a lot and let me give you the break­down," he said.

He said that on Wednes­day, they ad­min­is­tered 120, on Thurs­day they ad­min­is­tered 96 and on Fri­day, they ad­min­is­tered 76.

"So the fa­cil­i­ties un­der the care of the North West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NWRHA) which is re­spon­si­ble for Ari­ma, Cau­ra and Cou­va and we al­so brought in some peo­ple from Au­gus­tus Long, in those three days was 292," he said.

Deyals­ingh said that the South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (SWRHA) start­ed its vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme for "the most front-line of the front-line." And they did 108, he said.

On the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty's vac­ci­na­tions, he said "They would have re­ceived 200 dos­es which would go to the first 100 of their most front-line work­ers." Those were ad­min­is­tered on Sat­ur­day.

Deyals­ingh said he was very pleased with the num­bers as it spoke of the high de­gree of vac­cine ac­cep­tance among the health­care pop­u­la­tion.

"These num­bers are very en­cour­ag­ing," he said.

Deyals­ingh said that af­ter the ad­min­is­ter­ing of the the sec­ond 600, there would be no more vac­ci­na­tions from this batch for the next eight to 12 weeks un­til they have to get their sec­ond shot.

In prepa­ra­tion for the CO­V­AX vac­cines, the min­istry has cre­at­ed 20 in­oc­u­la­tion sites; three un­der the TRHA and the ER­HA and sev­en each at the SWRHA and the NWRHA.

"When the CO­V­AX ship­ment ar­rives, we will be go­ing down deep­er in­to our health care work­ers," he said.

Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said that the sec­ond boost­er shot must be giv­en be­tween eight and 12 weeks and the min­istry in­tend­ed to stick to that time-frame be­tween the first and sec­ond shots but will try to get clos­er to the 12-week in­ter­val.

Vac­ci­na­tions are strict­ly vol­un­tary and the State can­not force some­one to take the vac­cine.

Paras­ram con­firmed that one el­der­ly male pa­tient has died from COVID-19 tak­ing that tal­ly to 139.