Argentina welcomed a shipment of 570,000 Covid-19 vaccines from the Sinopharm laboratory on Friday, lifting its cumulative total from deliveries to 55 million virus shots.
Qatar Airways flight 8157 touched down in the early hours of yesterday morning at Ezeiza international airport, with government officials on hand to take delivery.
According to the Health Ministry’s Public Vaccination Monitor as of 6pm Friday, 50,887,274 doses have already been distributed nationwide, with 44,049,176 applied. Of those, 28,249,162 correspond to the first dose, with 15,800,014 people having completed their immunisation plan.
Argentina has received 55,471,120 vaccines in total, broken down as such: 15,000,920 of Sputnik V (10,955,260 of the first component, of which 1,179,625 were produced in the country by Laboratorios Richmond SA; 4,045,660 of the second dose, of which 702,500 were produced locally); 15,594,200 from AstraZeneca (580,000 Covishield; 1,944,000 via the World Health Organisation’s Covax scheme; 11,859,200 provided directly by the laboratory; 400,000 donated by the Spain government, 811,000 from Mexico, co-produced there and in Argentina); 21,176,000 from the Sinopharm lab; 200,000 of Cansino; and 3,500,000 Moderna shots (donated by the White House).
According to a government statement issued Friday morning (i.e. not including Friday’s applications), 84.9% of the population aged 18 years or over have received at least one vaccine. Just over 46 percent of adults have been given both.
City outlook
With vaccination continuing to advance, Buenos Aires City Health Minister Fernán Quirós forecast Friday that by the end of the month, 70 percent of the porteños could be fully vaccinated.
"We have been vaccinating at [a rate of] one percent [of the City's population] per day. If we continue to have vaccine supplies, during September we will probably reach 70 percent of porteños [City residents], which is a significant number,” he said during his daily briefing.
To date, the nation's capital has registered just over 500,000 cases of Covid-19, with 11,689 deaths. Quirós has praised the population for its quick uptake when it comes to vaccination, declaring that 93 percent of those living in the City had been given at least one shot.
After hitting a peak of more than 30,000 daily infections in April, Argentina has now recorded a consecutive fall in Covid-19 cases for the last 14 weeks.
As of Friday at 6pm, a total of 5.199 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 have been recorded in Argentina since March 2020, with 112,356 fatalities, according to government data.
Intensive care beds have now dropped to 43.8 percent occupancy nationwide, rising slightly to 44.7 percent in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA)
– TIMES/NA
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