Islamabad: Pakistan is set to start vaccinating people who are 60-years-old and above from Wednesday March 10. This is going to be the third phase of the vaccination drive kicked off last month.
The first phase covered frontline health workers aged 65 and above, then health workers (frontline and non-frontline) aged 60 and above were asked to get registered and get vaccinated.
Now, in the third phase, the general population of 60-year old and above will be administered COVID-19 vaccine.
Minister for Planning, Development & Special Initiative Asad Umar in a tweet on Sunday announced, “The vaccination of 60-year old will start from Wednesday and the older persons who have got registered will be vaccinated first. Details will be shared tomorrow (Monday),” said the minister in his tweet.
Around 250,000 vaccinated so far
Meanwhile, despite the government’s efforts, the vaccination drive has not picked up pace in the country and by Sunday, around 250,000 frontline and general health workers were vaccinated.
Pakistan has ample stock of vaccines, around one million doses of Sinopharm, the Chinese vaccine that is administered twice (with a 21 day gap after the first shot). The country’s close ally China has given these vaccines as a good will gesture and a gift.
Prime Minister’s Special Assistant on Health Dr Faisal Sultan confirmed the process was slow and so far around 250,000 out of 1 million doses of vaccine have been administered.
Senior doctors set example
In order to motivate health workers to receive jabs, a campaign has been launched across the country in which senior doctors are administered COVID-19 vaccines to motivate people to do the same.
Dr Faisal Sultan also got first shot of Sinopharm on Feb 22 and reported he was fine.
This strategy is quite useful and yielding results particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). We are vaccinating 2,000 health workers from the past one week because the heads of the hospitals are getting vaccinations and the staff is also following the suit. So far, we have vaccinated 22,000 frontline health workers throughout the province,” said a senior official of the KP Health department.
In Punjab too, health workers are reluctant to get vaccinated. The province received 70,000 corona vaccine doses as part of the third consignment, but health professionals are still reluctant to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
As per details, only 35 percent health professionals have been vaccinated so far. So far less than 50,000 out of 275,000 health workers have been vaccinated, the official further said.
39 deaths in one day
Pakistan on Sunday reported 39 deaths and 1,780 new cases of coronavirus in the last twenty-four hours. With these latest numbers, the country’s tally of cases has reached 590,508 and the death toll has surged to 13,205, according to the official portal of the Ministry of the National Health Services (NHS) more than 38,000 tests were conducted in the last one day.
Still there are 18,055 active cases of COVID-19 in the country while 1,038 persons were recovered in the last one day taking the overall recoveries to 559,248.
