ISLAMABAD: Sustaining its rapid vaccination rate, Islamabad became Pakistan’s first city to fully vaccinate 50 percent of its eligible population against Covid-19, said the chief od the National Command and Operation Centre on Sunday.
“Islamabad has become the first city in Pakistan to have at least 50% of its eligible population [15 years & older] fully vaccinated,” Asad Umar tweeted.
Islamabad has become the first city in Pakistan to have at least 50% of its eligible population (15 years & older) fully vaccinated. 71% of Islamabad eligible population has recieved atleast 1 dose. Need to see an acceleration of second dose in other cities
— Asad Umar (@Asad_Umar) September 12, 2021
“71 [percent] of Islamabad eligible population has received at least 1 dose,” said he, stressing the need to further ramp up the rollout in other cities.
Last month, the government announced that from September, workers in schools, shopping malls and hospitality businesses, and the transport and air travel industries would be barred from entering public offices unless they had a vaccine certificate.
Over the weekend, the NCOC had decided to further lower the eligibility age for vaccination to 15 years.
The government has decided to launch vaccination of youth up to 15 to 18 years of age as part of its efforts to inoculate the public.
The vaccination for the people in the said age group will begin from September 13 (Monday) and will utilise the Pfizer vaccine.
The government in June reached an agreement to procure 13 million doses of its vaccine from Pfizer. An exact timeline was not provided but the government said at the time that the jabs would arrive by year-end.
Pakistan has primarily used Chinese vaccines — Sinopharm, CanSino Bio and Sinovac — in its inoculation drive but has now begun to allow those needing it to travel abroad to vaccinate with Pfizer and Moderna doses of which the government has a limited supply.
With the new infections, the overall case count reached 1.2 million with over 1 million recoveries.
Pakistan has seen soaring coronavirus infections, fuelled by the highly transmissible Delta variant, putting its poor health infrastructure under extreme pressure. Officials say more than 70 percent of new cases are Delta variant infections.
The death toll climbed to 26,720 with another 58 fatalities due to the virus in the past 24 hours.
Out of a population of 220 million, more than 50 million have received at least one vaccine shot, and 21 million have been fully vaccinated, according to the NCOC.
After a sluggish start to the inoculation campaign, the new requirement for certificates of vaccination has led to a rush of people seeking shots, with queues stretching over a kilometre outside some vaccination centres, notably in Karachi.
The Sindh government has put extra pressure on people to get vaccinated, warning that it would withhold the salaries of government servants and block people’s cell phone SIM cards unless they had the required certificates.
