A plane of Pakistan Air Force (PAF) has departed for China link on Sunday (today) to bring the first batch of Coronavirus Vaccine comprising 500,000 doses. The plane will land back in Pakistan on Monday.
According to the details, IL-78 of PAF left for Beijing from Noor Khan Base. In the first phase, China will provide Pakistan with 500,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine. The authorities have confirmed that China has donated a total of 1.1 million vaccine doses to Pakistan.
The vaccine would be preserved in the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) and National Disaster Management Authority’s (NDMA) cold storage from where it will be transported to the provinces.
The first batch of vaccines will be provided by the Chinese government as an aid, the foreign office spokesperson said and added that the Chinese government will “actively coordinate with the relevant Chinese enterprise to speed up the export of vaccines to Pakistan”.
Coronavirus Situation in Pakistan
On the other hand, the National Command and Operations Center (NCOC) reported that the novel coronavirus claimed 34 more lives in the country in the past 24 hours taking the national death tally to 11,657.
Moreover, 1,599 more people got infected with the dread virus in a single day taking the national tally to 544,813. As many as 42,455 samples were tested during this period. The positivity ratio of Covid-19 cases was recorded at 3.76 per cent.
Moreover there are a total of 33,182 active cases as 499,974 people have recuperated.
Since the first Covid-19 case was detected in the country almost a year back, Sindh has reported a total of 246,437 infections, Punjab 157,353, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 66,953, Balochistan 18,815, Islamabad 41,359, Azad Jammu and Kashmir 8,988, and Gilgit Baltistan 4,908.