Pakistan’s daily jabs cross record one million

Ag Agencies

ISLAMABAD: The National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) on Tuesday announced that the country has administered more than a million coronavirus vaccine doses — the highest daily vaccinations on record so far — as the country’s active Covid infections surged past the 75,000 mark.

According to the NCOC, 1,072,342 Covid-19 vaccines were administered to eligible individuals across the country “meeting the highest per-day vaccinations target” in the 24 hours preceding Tuesday. A total of 31,929,581 vaccines doses have been administered so far across the country. So far, a little over 6.7 million are fully vaccinated.

Islamabad boasts the highest vaccination rate in the country, with more than 50 per cent of its population inoculated, according to Geo News. Peshawar and Rawalpindi have inoculated about 35 percent of their populations, Faisalabad 28 per cent, while Lahore, Gujranwala, Sialkot and Sargodha about 27 per cent. The report said 26 per cent of Karachi’s eligible individuals were inoculated and 25 percent of Hyderabad’s.

Authorities have stepped up the vaccination drive across the country to slow down the fourth wave of the coronavirus, a surge that has spread due to the Delta variant, which originated in India.

The disease positivity ratio across the country was 7.19 per cent, with Karachi’s infectivity rate remaining above 20 percent despite a lockdown in the province.

As of Tuesday, NCOC data showed active Covid-19 cases reaching 75,373 across the country after 3,582 more people tested positive. At least 67 coronavirus patients died. There were 3,398 patients in critical condition, 325 of whom were on ventilators. A total of 1,043,277 cases have been detected so far, and about 23,529 have died.

Meanwhile, Parliamentary Secretary of National Health Services Dr Nausheen Hamid stressed that there were no shortages of vaccines in the country.

“I am very much confident that the whole population will get vaccinated by Dec 2021,” she said, speaking to a private news channel.

Replying to a question, she said a third dose of vaccines was still not under consideration in Pakistan but many other countries are going for it.