Silvia Lutucuta, who was speaking after a visit of the President of the European Council to the Paz Flor vaccination center, said that Charles Michel was "sensitized" by the work that the country is developing in the fight against covid-19, particularly in the vaccination campaign, which began on March 2.
"For the doses that we had, we did the vaccination with a very fast pace," said the minister, adding that Angola received about one million doses of vaccine from AstraZeneca under the Covax initiative.
Angola has already immunized about 513 thousand people, with "a special attention" to the province of Luanda where there is community circulation of the wild, English and South African strain, she continued, highlighting the interest in sensitizing international partners to obtain more vaccines, a subject that was addressed with the president of the European Council.
"As much as possible, he will also help our country in this global mobilization. Our hope is to get a larger quantity of vaccines as soon as possible," stressed Silvia Lutucuta, adding that this is the best time to vaccinate, before a scenario of an increase in the number of cases.
This week, the minister announced that Angola, currently with 26,431 cases, is in the "second wave" of the pandemic, with the numbers of infections approaching the peak of the disease in October last year.
A situation that she hopes to control with the awareness of the population and the strengthening of the "health diplomacy" to achieve the goal of about 52 percent of vaccinated citizens.
Lutucuta admitted that the situation in India is a "worldwide concern", stressing that globalization makes it difficult to control the entry of new strains, despite the "barriers" that are established as the pre-disembarkation test and the post-disembarkation testing at the Luanda airport.
The governor also said that the Angolan authorities are doing genotyping in partnership with a South African university to detect the new strains and so far the Indian variant has not been identified.
"But we have to be on alert, we have areas of our economy that have professionals from those latitudes, we will be careful, continue with assertive epidemiological surveillance," he concluded.
The covid-19 pandemic has caused at least 3,168,333 deaths worldwide, resulting from more than 150.4 million cases of infection, according to an assessment made by the French agency AFP.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
