The federal government will offer COVID-19 booster shots to everyone, President López Obrador said Friday.
He said the government has sufficient doses for a universal booster scheme because it invested 40 billion pesos (US $1.9 billion) in the purchase of vaccines.
Mexico ranks seventh in the world in terms of the number of doses it has available, López Obrador told reporters at his morning news conference, held in Chihuahua.
He noted that booster shots are already being offered to seniors and confirmed that teachers will be next in line. He didn’t say when they would be offered to health workers, who received their initial doses at the start of Mexico’s vaccine rollout.
López Obrador called on people who decided not to get vaccinated when they first became eligible to come forward and get a shot.
“I’m sure there are towns in the Chihuahua Sierra where people haven’t yet been vaccinated,” he said.
Just over 79.2 million people in Mexico have received at least one dose of a vaccine, the Health Ministry reported Thursday. The figure equates to 86% of the eligible population, which as of last month is people aged 15 and over.
In other COVID-19 news:
• Mexico’s accumulated case tally increased to 3.91 million on Thursday with 3,180 new infections reported. The official COVID-19 death toll rose by 293 to 296,186.
• Mexico City will remain low risk green on the coronavirus stoplight map next week, authorities said. COVID spokesman Eduardo Clark said there were no signs of a spike in case numbers and hospitalizations continue to decline.
About 75% of COVID patients in the hospital are not vaccinated, he said.
Clark called on people not to gather with friends and families over the Christmas holiday period if they have COVID symptoms or know they were in contact with someone with the disease.
• Baja California, one of five yellow medium risk states on the current stoplight map, has the highest number of active cases in the country. The northern border state has 3,341 current infections, the Health Ministry said Thursday.
Mexico City ranks second for active cases with 2,415 followed by Guanajuato (1,806); Chihuahua (1,776); Sonora (1,596); and Coahuila (1,311).
At the municipal level, Tijuana has the highest number of active cases followed by Mexicali, Chihuahua, León, Hermosillo, Ensenada, Álvaro Obregón (in Mexico City), San Luis Potosí, Aguascalientes and Juárez.
There are just over 20,000 estimated active cases across the country.
With reports from Milenio
