PESHAWAR: Health department is resuming Covid-19 vaccination after receiving 240,000 doses from the centre on Monday as coronavirus cases continue to drop in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The province reported five mortalities due to coronavirus and 75 new cases, according to a report of health department.

The government has inoculated 1.3 million people above 18 years in the province so far but shortage of jabs has slowed down the process in most of the vaccination centres during the last three days.

Officials told this scribe that they would restart full-fledged immunisation of people in all centres on Tuesday. The health department has dispatched 175,000 doses to all the 635 vaccination centres, 43 mass vaccination centres and 60 mobile vehicles to resume administering the jabs to people.

The number of cases continues to drop in the province

The rest of stock has been retained by health department for emergency supply to the centres where more people are coming and may face shortage of jabs, according to officials.

“We have informed National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) that the province requires uninterrupted supply so that we can be able to administer it to 100,000 people per day. There’s no guarantee about the availability of vaccine but there is a commitment with all the provinces that they would get it as soon as the NCOC receives it from abroad,” they said.

Officials said that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was getting 15 per cent of every consignment of vaccine received by NCOC and would get more stock from the shipment to arrive in Pakistan on June 23. “We expect our share from a total of 2.5 million doses after two days,” they added.

They said that their vaccination capacity had reached 100,000 per day and there was need for unhindered supply so that they could maintain the momentum and achieve the target of inoculating 19 million people by end of current year. “Prior to shortage of vaccine, we had started vaccinating over 80,000 persons on daily basis,” said officials.

Meanwhile, the pandemic killed five more people in the province during the last 24 hours, according to Covid-19 situation report released by health department on Monday.

According to it, two persons each died of the virus in Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan and one in Mardan. The province for the first time reported 72, less than 100 cases since January this year, which made the total number of infected people 137,147. Of the infected people, 130,668 (94 per cent), including 133 recorded during the last 24 hours, have already recovered.

The report said that a total of 9,411 tests were conducted in the province. The number of active cases in the province is 2,205. A total of 4,274 persons have so far died of Covid-19 in the province including 61 per cent male and 39 per cent female.

It said that the pandemic killed 1,287 persons in age group of 61 to 70 years; followed by 1,215 in age group of 51 to 60 years; 652 in 71 to 80 years; 602 in 41 to 50 years; 200 in 31 to 40 years; 189 in 81 to 90 years; 63 in 21 to 30 years; 34 in 91 to 100 years; 24 in 11 to 20 years; and three in the age group up to 10 years.

Positivity rate of coronavirus continues to decline in the high-risk districts of the province. Peshawar’s infectivity rate is 3.9 per cent, Mardan’s 1.7 per cent and Swabi has 1.5 per cent positivity rate.

Published in Dawn, June 22nd, 2021