Home

Social Development Department in Free State aims to vaccinate more than 15 000 workers

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Social Development Department in the Free State is targeting more than  15 000 workers to get the COVID-19 vaccine. The sector recorded 13 fatalities since the outbreak of the coronavirus.

The vaccination rollout launched on Monday and will continue until Friday. Employees from the Social Development Department came in numbers to be vaccinated. The department aims to have many workers vaccinated this week, in an effort to fight the pandemic.

Social service workers provide frontline services daily. They include Early Childhood Development workers, South African Social Security Agency employees, and all social service professionals. Employees are happy to receive their injections.

“I feel very fortunate,  we know that in South Africa it is taking a long time for us to get the vaccine and I think as a young person I really feel excited that we are safe, my parents will be safer, I’m feeling very excited,” says one of the employees.

Social Development MEC Mamiki Qabathe says the department wants to ensure that all its employees are protected against coronavirus.

“The vaccination programme will run over a period of five days because we will not only be focusing on the work of Social Development but also be focusing on the social services sector as a whole. The work force of the department is about 2 050 but the social sector is almost 14 000 people. So that’s why we will be assisted through the whole five-day period.”

Health MEC, Montseng Tsiu says the province is beefing up its vaccine roll out.

“Getting a vaccine it’s really good for everybody and it’s going to help us because we know that the loss of life is one too many. We don’t want people dying and so many people have lost their lives through this pandemic. So, we are trying our level best to make sure that everybody gets vaccinated. In as far as the infection is concerned in our province, we are seeing our numbers stable. In the last week, it was stable but still high because they were over 5 00.”

To date, the province has administered 262 000 vaccines out of the 1.9 million target for herd immunity. The department has conceded that the Delta variant has been detected in the province but says there are few cases that have been identified.

 

 

Author

MOST READ