By Dominique Tassell
More than 3000 doses of Covid-19 vaccination were administered at the recent Darling Downs Health (DDH) vaccine clinics in the Southern Downs.
A total of 3503 jabs were given at the Warwick and Stanthorpe clinics and 1678 vaccinations were administered at the DDH vaccine clinic held in Stanthorpe Civic Centre from Monday 31 January to Friday 4 February.
Of those doses, 1596 were administered to adults. There were 60 first doses, 45 second doses, 1491 boosters administered, and 82 paediatric doses administered.
The week prior, 1825 doses were administered at the DDH vaccine clinic held in Warwick Town Hall from 27 January to 30 January,
1687 adult doses were administered, with 45 of those being first doses, 56 being second doses, and 1586 being booster doses.
138 paediatric first doses were administered.
With students returning to school on Monday 7 February, Chief Health Officer John Gerrard highlighted the importance of getting boosters.
Dr Gerrard said last week he was not expecting to see an increase in children being hospitalised.
“The bigger risk to the healthcare system from the schools opening is the parents and the grandparents that are being infected from a child,” he said.
“So it is critically important that the parents get in, get vaccinated and the grandparents get that booster.”
Updates on Covid-19 cases in children are now being provided at the daily press conferences.
On Tuesday 8 February, it was reported that 313 children between the age of five and 17 had tested positive for the virus in the last 24 hours and 11 of that age group were in the hospital.
“Most of, if not all of these will be in hospital for a reason other than Covid. So if they have appendicitis and happened to test positive, they will be included in this data, but it will give us some idea of what impact the return of schools has had,” he said.
“There’s been a substantial decline in the number of children infected In the last four weeks.
“What level of immunity that we’ll have created in children as they go back to school is yet to be seen but we fully expect it will be a rise in cases in the coming weeks, but it will be interesting to see what happens and we’ll be sharing that the data as it arrives with us.”
At the same press conference, Health Minister Yvette D’Ath said the virus had also claimed the lives of 11 First Nations people since the border reopened, and 16,256 people had tested positive.
“Now those 11 deaths obviously are tragic, but I’m pleased to see that we are not seeing a disproportionate number of First Nations people passing away from this virus at the current time, but we are still seeing low vaccination rates in some of our First Nations communities,” she said.
Queensland has now hit its 90 per cent double dose milestone for those aged 16 and over.
