People who received their first dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine eight weeks ago can — effective immediately — make an appointment for their second shot directly with a designated medical facility, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday.
By booking their vaccination with the same brand directly, they would not have to wait until at least Nov. 20 to make an appointment online, it said.
Direct bookings would be possible until the end of the current vaccination round on Friday, said Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who is the CECC’s spokesman, adding that the central online appointment system would on Thursday close for the current round.
Photo courtesy of the CECC
Until then, people who received their first AstraZeneca dose before Aug. 27 could make appointments for their second dose, he said.
Meanwhile, direct second-dose appointments with medical facilities would until Friday be available for adults who received a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine four or more weeks ago and have not yet made an appointment for their second dose online, Chuang said.
Previously, only the online booking system was open for second BioNTech-dose recipients aged 12 or older.
Chuang said that as of Friday, 26,080,250 COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered nationwide.
The first-dose vaccination rate was 74.42 percent, while 36.89 percent of Taiwan residents had received two doses.
Meanwhile, 590,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine purchased by the government arrived at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport yesterday night, the CECC said.
The center reported no new local cases, but two imported cases, travelers arriving from Indonesia and the US.
The sole local case reported the day before — an Indonesian woman who was tested for COVID-19 multiple times, with only one test result being positive — has been removed from the list of local cases, Chuang said.
The positive test result had shown a high cycle threshold (CT) value of 40 — indicating no recent infection — and further polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests on the same sample at the CDC’s Kunyang Laboratory were negative, he said.
Two more PCR tests on the woman ruled out that she had the virus, he added.
The results of PCR and antibody tests on seven members of her household who had been listed as close contacts were all negative, Chuang said.
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