Pakistan receives another batch of 3.5m Pfizer vaccine doses from US

Pakistan has received another shipment of 3.5 million COVID-19 Pfizer vaccines from the United States, the US Embassy in Islamabad said Wednesday.

This takes the total "number of COVID-19 vaccine doses donated by the United States to Pakistan to 15.7 million," the US Embassy in Islamabad wrote on Twitter.

Earlier, the US donated 6.6 million doses of Pfizer vaccine to Pakistan.

The US Embassy in Islamabad had announced that the tranche of the vaccines had been shipped to Pakistan, adding that it would help the country inoculate young and at-risk citizens.

On August 26, the US had donated 3.6 million doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to Pakistan under the COVAX programme. The donation came in addition to the 5.5 million Moderna vaccine doses donated by the US government to Pakistan in July.

Read more: Pakistan's fourth COVID-19 wave weakens as country records decline in positivity rate, active cases

What is the current status of coronavirus in Pakistan?

Pakistan has been recording a slow decline in its daily COVID-19 numbers over the last two days, with 2,714 fresh cases reported Wednesday morning, the National Command and Operation Centre's statistics showed.

According to the NCOC's latest stats, the positivity rate fell to 4.78%. The last time the country's positivity rate was less than 5% was on July 24.

The 2,714 new cases were detected after 56,733 coronavirus tests were taken in the last 24 hours. This pushes the total number of cases to 1,212,809.

There is a small downward trend in daily numbers, with active cases going under 80,000 for the first time since early August. The number of active cases currently are 77,532.

In the last 24 hours, another 73 people have died of COVID-19, pushing the death toll to 26,938.

The total recoveries crossed the 1.1 million mark after 10,923 people recovered from the virus in the last 24 hours. As of now, some 1,108,339 patients have recovered.

What is the status of vaccinations in Pakistan?

Pakistan has administered at least 68,227,337 doses of COVID vaccines so far. Assuming every person needs 2 doses, that’s enough to have vaccinated about 15.8% of the country’s population.

During the last week reported, Pakistan averaged about 1,040,926 doses administered each day. At that rate, it will take a further 42 days to administer enough doses for another 10% of the population.