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ARCHIVED - Annual flu vaccination campaign begins on Tuesday in the Murcia Region
This year 370,000 doses have been purchased and the health authority hopes to reach 75% of those entitled to a free vaccine
Last year 70% of the serious flu cases hospitalised in the Murcia Region had not been vaccinated even thought the patients were entitled to a free vaccination.
This year the annual flu campaign begins on Tuesday October 13th and the regional health authority is urging anyone entitled to a vaccine to get themselves vaccinated due to the current coronavirus pandemic. A patient contracting both flu and coronavirus is twice as likely to suffer severe complications and a study carried out recently in the UK found that those contracting both viruses were twice as likely to die as a result.
Regional Health Minister Manuel Villegas said that, "In this season, co-circulation of influenza and covid viruses will occur, and since both viruses can cause complications in the same population groups, vaccination against influenza is especially important to individually reduce the risk of suffering from one of these diseases and also contribute to avoiding a possible overload of the healthcare system .
Influenza and pneumococcal infections are the pathologies that cause the greatest disease and mortality of all those that can be prevented by vaccination," he said.
The regional health authority has brought forward the start of the vaccination campaign by two weeks this year and aims to immunize people at higher risk of complications, as well as people who can transmit the disease to those at high risk of complications.
This year nearly 300 vaccination points have been set up and health centres currently closed in order to concentrate health authority staff into the areas in which they are most needed, will re-open for the vaccination period. Some centres will open in the afternoons as well as the morning in order to limit the possibility of contact between patients.
For the first time this year health service personnel will also vaccinate around 2,500 immobilized or vulnerable people in their homes as well as their carers, and a special programme has been prepared to vaccinate residents of residences for the elderly and disability centers. In order to reinforce the protection of the elderly in these centres, they will be vaccinated with a high antigenic load vaccine, a vaccine marketed for the first time in Spain and which has been reserved for these people. Residents 65 years of age and older will also be vaccinated against pneumococcus in order to provide them with greater protection against respiratory infections.
Anyone over 65 wishing to be vaccinated against pneumococcus must request it from their health center, by phone or online when booking an appointment.
370,000 doses in 2020:
For this season, the Ministry has acquired 265,100 doses to which are added another 105,340 provided by the Ministry of Health, making a total of 370,440 doses available, compared to 240,000 the previous season. The total cost of this year’s influenza and pneumococcal vaccination campaign is 1,387,300 euros, 238,300 more than in 2019.
The campaign is aimed at the particularly vulnerable within the population, such as people aged 60 and over, pregnant women and those who have given birth within the last 6 months, chronically ill patients or those with previous pathologies as well as those who could transmit the virus to high-risk people, such as health professionals and teachers. Flu vaccines for those not considered at risk, but still wishing to vaccinate, can be purchased over the counter in pharmacies for a few euros.
This year the Ministry has set the objective of reaching 75 percent coverage both in people 65 years of age and over and in health personnel.
Pneumococcus (pneumonia)
People who turn 60 during 2020 should protect themselves against pneumococcus if they have not done so previously. In addition, those who were vaccinated in 2015 when they reached 60 should receive a booster dose, so this year the health department has purchased 25,000 doses of pneumococcal vaccines, 5,000 more than in the previous season, which will be administered coinciding with the influenza vaccine to improve pneumococcal vaccination coverage.
Prevention and symptoms
The Health Minister also recommended taking "the same preventive measures that we are already adopting against covid, such as frequent hand washing, especially after coughing or sneezing, since the flu is spread from person to person mainly by droplets of saliva or secretions emitted by coughing or sneezing. "
2019-2020 season
Influenza activity in the 2019-20 season was considered to be “moderate” last year in both the Region of Murcia and in Spain as a whole. Last year the main flu season began in the second week of January, and reached its peak at the end of that month, with 310 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, higher than the national average of 270. Last year the official figures produced by the national Health Authority estimated that flu caused 3,900 deaths in Spain. In total, 619,000 cases were reported via health centres (flu is a notifiable illness, so all health centres must report their cases to the health authority through a monitoring system) , 27,700 hospitalisations were recorded relating to flu last year, 1,800 people were admitted to intensive care and there were 3,900 deaths in total.
Covid is a lot deadlier than flu
During the last 5 years, an average of 11,292 people have died from flu in the UK according to official British Government statistics each winter. Already this year the UK has reported nearly 50,000 deaths directly attributable to Covid, although the figures have been altered with 5,000 deaths knocked off and we KNOW that these figures do not include many care home deaths. Draw your own conclusion.
Last winter there were 619,000 cases of flu registered in Spain through the health system, 27,700 of those cases were hospitalised, 1,800 ended up in an ICU unit, but in the end, there were only 3,900 deaths attributed to flu, and that included attributing a large number of the “excess deaths” over and above what would be a “normal” level of deaths in Spain to flu, NOT basing the estimate on actual hospital deaths.
Looking at the CONFIRMED NUMBER OF DEATHS in hospitals attributed to flu, the figures are astonishingly low; in the 2017-2018 season for example, only 897 deaths were flu related in all of Spain, 98% of which were related to existing medical conditions, and 49% of whom had not been vaccinated against flu.
In the preceding winter, there were only 421 deaths in hospitals attributed to flu, again, 51% of those who died had not been vaccinated against flu.
The bulk of the figures in the official government estimates of last winter in Spain, come not from the actual hospital deaths, but from examining the MoMo figures and figures produced by the National Institute of Statistics, as many people die at home, or die from the aggravated effects of flu, ie pneumonia. These bodies look at the deaths reported by death certificates in the civil registries of Spain (the INE stats) and the Mortality Monitoring System in Spain (MoMo), of the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII), which gathers information provided by the 3,929 computerized civil registries of the Ministry of Justice from all over Spain. By examining the percentage of deaths over and above what could normally be expected at any given time and comparing them against the flu spikes (the flu season starts in week 40 of a given year and ends in week 20 of the following year but usually starts to peak around specific weeks depending on the weather and strain of flu), they can generate very accurate estimates of the total number of deaths attributable to flu, and in Spain every year this hovers around the 4,000 mark.
The summer MoMo figures. In brief;
On the comparison date the Spanish Ministry of Health had reported 30,004 deaths from Covid-19, ALL of which have been PCR tested.
Between 13th March to May 22nd during the main period of the coronavirus pandemic, there were 43,034 more deaths than statistically expected for this time of year, representing an increase of 55% over what would normally be expected.
And during the summer period, 3,560 excess deaths, some of which could arguably be attributed to the warm weather, so for arguments’ sake, let’s remove a generous 1,000, making the total of excess deaths in total, 45,594.
The INE data is always latent, and there has been a big delay in processing the deaths in civil registries, so INE data is only available for the first 21 weeks of 2020, to May 24th, during which period 225,930 people died in total, an increase of 24.1% or 43,945 actual people, over and above what would be normal, very similar to the MoMo, but considerably higher than the 30,000 official covid deaths (bear in mind, we are in September now so the data from May 24th onwards has yet to be added).
Another set of figures which back up these figures were published this week by the 5,547 care homes of Spain, through the regional governments. Their figures stated that 20,058 residents died in care homes during the first wave of the covid crisis from covid, although most of these were not PCR tested, so therefore the Ministry of Health and WHO refuse to include them in the official figures, but, they do tie in with the excess death figures of the MoMo and NIE.
So, social media users shouting that more people die of flu than covid, are wrong.Very wrong. Covid is considered by scientists worldwide to be at least 10 times as lethal as “common flu”.
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