Over 500 doctors have joined the 'Doctors help the Czech Republic' initiative

At the call of the Doctors Help the Czech Republic initiative, more than 500 doctors have signed up since its publication on Tuesday morning. 68 nurses and more than 200 volunteers also want to participate. The initiative, which has set a goal to accelerate vaccination third doses of vaccine covidu-19, today introducedon twitter. On Tuesday, she was supported at a joint press conference by Prime Minister-designate Petr Fiala (ODS) and resigned Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (YES). He told reporters today that he is preparing to open more vaccination centers, but staff could be missing and volunteers should help. On Friday, he will see the new space for the center instead of the O2 universum hall.

There are over 33,000 outpatient doctors, so far about 3,300 practitioners’ surgeries are vaccinated. The initiative, which is mainly supported by outpatient dentists, wants to supplement the capacities of vaccination centers with the possibility of getting vaccinated at a designated time in any doctor’s office. According to the schemethey introduced, an interactive map should be created. To order a vaccine, people would have to report to the doctor’s office in advance. Another option for doctors is to help directly at the hospital’s vaccination center.

Babiš said that other centers should be established in Prague, Liberec and Pardubice. In the center of the capital, the vaccination center should occupy one floor of the Kotva department store. “We are dealing with shopping centers to achieve vaccination capacity as in June,” the prime minister said in resignation. According to him, over 120,000 vaccinations should be managed daily. Babiš said that on Friday he will see the new space on offer instead of the O2 universum hall, where there would be a permanent vaccination center. On Friday, he is also going to the Central Military Hospital, which provided vaccination in the O2 hall. But the hospital has already announced that it does not have staff now. “We will ask those who were there to help. We will supply staff on the initiative Doctors help the Czech Republic,” Babiš said.

There are about 6,800 general practitioners for adults and 4,800 for children and adolescents in the Czech Republic. According to the ministry, only about 3,360 surgeries are vaccinated. There are about 7,500 dentists, about 1,600 gynecologists and about 12,700 other outpatient specialists. Interest in vaccinations has been growing in recent weeks. The biggest interest is on Friday, last week over 70,000 people came for the vaccine. Almost half of them received a booster dose. The highest number of vaccinations since the start of revaccination was reported on Tuesday, almost 47,000.

Five months after the vaccination is completed, there are about 3.7 million people, according to surveys, about 70 percent of them are interested in a booster dose. So far, approximately 875,000 people have received a booster dose, over 650,000 of them in November alone. If one million people are vaccinated with a booster dose in a week, members of the initiative estimate that the number of vaccinated people who would go to hospitals will be halved. Thus, about a hundred less people would need hospitalization every day and income in the ICU would be reduced by 15 people.

“At the moment, we have both vaccines and IT tools to deliver on our ambitious plan. We lack doctors to create new and strengthen existing vaccination sites and mobile teams,” she said.initiative. Unlike the start of vaccination, which fully protects up to two weeks after the second dose, ie 35 days after the first vaccine, the booster protection will take effect within a week.

At the same time, the doctors stated at Tuesday’s press conference that the current onslaught on hospitals will not ease the vaccinations, because people who come to the hospitals in the next two weeks are already mostly infected, but will relieve them in January, February and March. About 6,500 people are currently hospitalized, of which almost 1,100 are in the ICU. In the worst wave of the epidemic in mid-March, there were over 9,500 patients in total and over 2,000 in intensive care.

In the Czech Republic, petitions were filed for and against compulsory vaccination against covid-19, signed by tens of thousands of people. This follows from information about petitions that can be signed online. In one of them, called the Declaration of Physicians, its authors describe the state’s approach to the unvaccinated as a restriction of freedom and pressure on a group of people. By today’s 14:00, it was signed by about 770 doctors and about 18,000 other people. According to the Manipulátoři.cz website, it is supported by disinformation websites.

The first petition in support also appeared in mid-Novembercompulsory vaccination. Its author, microbiologist Petr Šebo, believes that a minority of vaccination refusers is blocking the return to normal life for everyone else. “Unvaccinated patients filling hospitals and intensive care units draw huge sums from solidarity health insurance. They block the medical capacities needed to provide care to other patients. They delay the necessary operations of suffering patients. They exhaust medical capacities and endanger other patients, chronically ill and elderly,” he said. His petition was signed by over 5,800 people.

The Ministry of Health, led by the outgoing Minister Adam Vojtěch (YES), proposes that vaccination be mandatory for selected professions and people over the age of 60 who are more at risk from covid-19. The new government of the Spolu (ODS, TOP 09 and KDU-ČSL) and PirSTAN coalitions has not yet given a unified position on compulsory vaccination. The candidate for Minister Vlastimil Válek (TOP 09) rather rejects him.