The “car-through” vaccination center, which has been installed in Queimódromo, next to Parque da Cidade, began work on Thursday and is supposed to allow 2,000 people to be vaccinated per day, the Porto City Council revealed today.
The municipality, in a press release, invited the media to attend the opening of this structure, which goes into effect on Thursday.
The Mayor of Porto, President of ARS-N, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Centro Hospitalar de São João, and CEO of UNILABS present how this space operates on site.
On June 30, Porto’s independent mayor Rui Moreira, in statements to Lusa, announced that the “car-through” vaccination center, scheduled to be located in Chimodromo, had already been given the go-ahead from the government.
The equipment, which will allow 2,000 people to be vaccinated a day, was ready for use last February, but authorization from the government and the “task force” for vaccination did not arrive until the end of June and after reports of queues of several hours.
“I think we need about five or six days to get it up and running,” the mayor said at the time. “There are logistical issues that need to be clarified.”
Operating the structure, which is designed to vaccinate people who performed automated scheduling of the vaccine, will now be responsible for the Regional Health Administration in the North (ARS-North) in coordination with partners, specifically Unilabs.
The council will be responsible for providing all required support, including relocation of facilities and police.
This structure, which was emphasized by the mayor at that time, will make it possible to reduce the verified load that was “excessive” in the army transport regiment.
On June 24, the Sao Joao holiday in Porto, the Chamber activated civil protection and firefighters to support those waiting in line at the COVID-19 vaccination center installed in the Army’s Transport Regiment, where long queues were recorded.
The Porto City Council on April 5 approved the Memorandum of Understanding with the Sao Joao Hospital Center, with the aim of implementing a COVID-19 vaccination center in Chimodromo, but the equipment has been in place since February ready for activation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused at least 3,996,519 deaths worldwide, resulting from more than 184.4 million cases of the novel coronavirus, according to the latest assessment by Agence France-Presse.
In Portugal, since the beginning of the epidemic, in March 2020, 17,126 people died, and 896,026 cases of infection were recorded, according to the Directorate General of Health.
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which was discovered in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in countries such as the United Kingdom, India or South Africa.
