HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — Danica Hufana, 29, held off getting her Covid-19 vaccination until after she gave birth to her second child, and is looking forward to a booster shot six months from now.
“I was worried about what it would do to my pregnancy, but a week after I gave birth, I got vaccinated. I just got my second dose of Pfizer,” Hufana said Tuesday at the University of Guam Calvo Field House vaccination clinic.
Her sister Dahlia Lopez, 32, also just received her second Pfizer dose after earlier doubting the vaccine’s safety, but recently weighing it against thoughts of her young children.
Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero said it was encouraging to see the turnout of people getting vaccinated Tuesday, while also sharing that it’s just a matter of time before the Omicron coronavirus variant is confirmed on Guam.
She compared what she called the eventual arrival of the Omicron variant to a supertyphoon and called on residents to “board up” by getting fully vaccinated and getting booster shots.
“Being real and practical, it’s just a matter of time until we see this virus here, until we see this variant here. And you know it is very contagious, it’s very transmissible and we are going to work with our people again like we have, to prevent them from being exposed to the transmissibility of this variant,” the governor told reporters before she administered the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine to her 8-year-old twin granddaughters Paloma and Contessa Cook.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not confirmed the presence of the Omicron variant on Guam. But local health officials have assumed for weeks now that the island very likely has Omicron in its midst because Hawaii has confirmed its first case in a patient with no recent travel history.
“Protect yourself, board up yourself like we’re going to have a supertyphoon,” the governor said.
CDC tracking as of Dec. 12-18 showed Omicron accounted for 73.2% of the new Covid-19 infections in the United States. New cases caused by the spread of the delta variant have receded to 26.6% of new cases.
Guam on Nov. 29 sent samples to the CDC for genome sequencing, and island officials continue to wait for results.
Guam has seen fewer new cases, hospitalizations and deaths after emerging from the delta variant surges, but the governor changed restrictions only slightly for the Christmas season to prepare for the possibility of the Omicron variant already existing on Guam.
‘Turning the corner’
“We are containing this virus that we have been fighting over the last two years. We are looking at turning the corner,” the governor said when asked about her Christmas message to the people of Guam.
She said she wants people to be able to celebrate Christmas and to have “some kind of normalcy.”
But in order for that to happen, she said, people need to be fully vaccinated and boosted, and must continue to wear their masks, watch their distance and wash their hands.
“And Merry Christmas to all of you and I’m hoping for a better year next year,” she added.
More than 128,000 Guam residents at least 5 years old have been fully vaccinated so far. More than 36,000 residents also have gotten booster shots. The number of Covid-19-related deaths has reached 270. Reported cases exceed 19,407, with most of the patients having fully recovered.
Guam Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero, a registered nurse, administers a dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to her granddaughter, Paloma Cook, Tuesday afternoon at the University of Guam Field House.
