The health authorities of Panama enabled a vaccination day against covid-19 for restaurant and hotel workers in Panama City, a measure "highly anticipated" by this sector, one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, which is now experiencing a rebound in the Central American country.

The Ministry of Health (Minsa) announced on Saturday that next Tuesday the vaccination with the AstraZeneca drug - reserved in Panama for those over 30 years old - will begin for workers in hotels and restaurants in the Panamanian capital, in a post installed in the Albrook Mall, the largest in the country.

This "long-awaited and requested" vaccination "is a good message for tourism," Domingo de Obaldia, president of the Association of Restaurants and Related Products of Panama (ARAP), told Efe.

The economic activity of the hotel and restaurant sector fell by 55.8% in 2020, impacted by mobility restrictions to prevent the spread of covid-19, and hundreds of these businesses remain closed or will no longer do so due to the crisis.

Likewise, hotel occupancy is currently less than 10% in the country, where many hotels have been closed since last year, according to data from the Panamanian Association of Hotels (Apatel).

Vaccinating restaurant and hotel workers "is going to help tourism a lot. Workers are going to be protected and we, in turn, are going to protect customers," Obaldia said on Saturday in statements to Efe.

Within the framework of the national vaccination plan against covid, which began on January 20, more than 1.57 million doses of the preparations from Pfizer, the main one in the country, and from AstraZeneca, pharmaceutical companies that have delivered to Panama, have been administered. more than 1.8 million servings.

Next week, patients with chronic diseases 16 years of age or older will begin to be vaccinated with the Pfizer preparation in 21 centers authorized nationwide, as well as people 40 years of age or older in the capital city of San Francisco, given the high incidence of disease there.

Panama has experienced an acceleration of new covid infections for several weeks, after having reached control of the pandemic last April represented by a positivity of cases of 5% or less, which is being faced with restrictions on mobility at night and on Sundays in the most affected areas.

For this Saturday 1,317 new cases of covid-19 were reported, after the application in the day of 14,113 detection tests that yielded a positivity of 9.3%, which raised to 407,330 confirmed infections in more than 15 months of pandemic.

In the last 24 hours, there were 7 deaths from the new coronavirus, which led to 6,567 accumulated deaths since March 9, 2020, when the first contagion of the disease was detected, which in Panama has a lethality of 1.6%.

There are 107 patients hospitalized in intensive care units (ICU) and 584 in the general ward, while 12,079 are isolated at home and 375 in hotels.