One year since the start of the anti-Covid vaccination in Romania: Less than half of the Romanians vaccinated

Today one year is marked since the start of the vaccination campaign in Romania. Since then, more than 7.7 million people have been vaccinated against Covid with a full-time vaccine, and many more are still awaited.

So, less than half of Romanians were vaccinated in the first year of the vaccination campaign against COVID-19 – 38.63% of the total population and 44% of the eligible population (over 12 years of age).

The vaccination rate has exceeded 50% of the eligible population only in Bucharest and in 5 counties, while the vaccination rate in the total population is even worse – only the Capital and Cluj County have exceeded 50%.

The vaccination of children in the 5-11 age group is scheduled to kick off in Romania in the second half of January 2022.

Counties with the highest vaccination rate:

• Bucharest – 66.14% of the eligible population and 57.82% of the total population

• Cluj – 58. 86% of the eligible population and 51.98% of the total population

• Constanța – 56.64% of the eligible population and 49.28% of the total population

• Sibiu – 53.96% of the eligible population and 46.67% of the total population

• Ilfov – 50.84% of the eligible population and 44.06% of the total population

• Brașov – 50.70% of the eligible population and 43.80% of the total population.

Counties with the lowest vaccination rate:

Doctors kept on warning on the risks of the low vaccination rates in Romania, with the shadow of wave 5 hanging over our heads.

Doctor Cristian Oancea, the manager of the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Timișoara, said that, against the current vaccination rate in Romania, of barely 40%, the Covid-19 wave 5 is announced to be “as extreme” as wave 4, which trashed the local healthcare system away and left tens of thousands of dead.

“Unfortunately, one year after the start of the campaign, there are somewhere between 40% of those considered who got vaccinated. We still have a long way to go before we reach that group immunization of 70 or 80%, as some EU countries have achieved. In November we made a statistic among the people who died in our hospital, the patients who died of Covid and out of 73 patients only 4 were vaccinated, and those patients were elderly, with comorbidities and in the oncology area. Vaccination means saving a life. We call for responsibility, for the world to be informed from medical sources, not from fake news (…). We can get vaccinated, we can get sick, but we can get a milder form of the disease, not end up in intensive care or, worse, die.

Wave 4 almost brought down our health care system and I think it was the first time we had patients who were treated by our colleagues abroad. On the other hand, look at what is happening in other countries with better vaccination rates than ours, England, France, Germany. Even though the infection rate is very high, tens of thousands of people are infected every day, but the rate of loading on intensive care and deaths is very low. We expect this wave to start in 2-3 weeks 5. It is possible this wave 5 to be extreme to stretch the healthcare system to the maximum“, doctor Oancea told Digi 24.