Vaccine Does Not Rule Out Precautionary Measures

Dailycsr.com – 17 March 2021 – Vaccines for COVID-19 viruses are here which could be reason enough for many of us to breath a sigh of relief. But hold on, not so fast since, “the worst is behind us” claimed Abbott in its blog.
 
Therefore, one needs to slow down and not forget to follow necessary “preventive measures” as the need for them still stand. “In fact, they're as important as they've ever been”, added Abbott. In January, COVID-19 positive cases reached “24 million” continuing to increase while death figures had touched nearly “400,000” revealed data from “Johns Hopkins University”
 
Therefore, preventive steps such washing hands, maintaining social distance and wearing mask outside the “family bubble” becomes a must besides getting tested. In the words of Abbott’s executive vice president for “Rapid and Molecular Diagnostics”, Andrea Wainer:
“Testing is a critical first-line of defense. It needs to be used in context with other hygiene practices of wearing your mask and washing your hands and by no means does this replace that. It comes together along with vaccinations. So, the more you can test, the more you can catch the virus. It's just simple math. Because at any one point in time, anyone can become infected.”
 
Furthermore, Abbott also reported that a “supermajority of Americans” have sided with what Wainer had to say. At last year’s end, a “Harris Poll” was conducted wherein “82% of Americans” were of the opinion that “the COVID-19 vaccine rollout will be more effective if it works in partnership with testing”.
 
Here are some of the results of the poll, as mentioned by Abbott:

 
Even with the given pace, we need to wait another year before the entire U.S. population gets vaccinated. In the words of Wainer:
“What we see is that the vaccination rollout, this needs to be done in conjunction with that. The vaccination rollout, it's going to take time to get everyone vaccinated, there's going to be individuals that are not comfortable with being vaccinated, and the demand continues to rise as people are trying to get back to work and school. So it needs to be done together and right now it's about detecting the virus, and as soon as we can have high levels of vaccination, some of the testing is going to turn to also antibody testing, determining how effective these vaccines are, how responsive individuals are to these vaccines.”
 
This way testing can reach out to “as many people in as many places as possible”. While Wainer added:
“What we see at the beginning of the year is that as the pandemic is continuing to surge and people are feeling more of an urgency to get back to normalcy, to get back to work and get back to school, we're continuing to increase our capacity and continuing to look at what we can build. So, for our at-home testing just in the first quarter alone, we're going to be bringing 30 million tests to the market and ramp up 90 million of those at-home tests in the second quarter.”
“And yes, we see that the demand is going to surpass the supply and so we're going to continue to look at how we can expand in manufacturing capacity to continue to meet what the world is needing from us.”
 
Ever since the pandemic was declared, Abbott came up with “eight COVID-19 tests for emergency use in the U.S.” besides delivering over three hundred million of “COVID-19 tests” across the globe. However, the work isn’t done yet as Abbott continues to ship tests and maintain their goal of making sure that it has the capacity for address the need of the hour.
 
 
 
References:
3blmedia.com