Bangladesh is set to inoculate 10 million people with first dose of Covid-19 vaccines today (Saturday) through a countrywide campaign.
The government will administer the vaccines at a total of 28,000 booths across the country, according to a senior official of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
Through the special campaign, the government has planned to reach its target of inoculating 70 per cent of the country's population with the first dose of Covid-19 vaccines.
Dr Shamsul Haque, director of the DGHS vaccination programmes, said, "We have taken all necessary preparations to conduct the vaccination drive across the country."
"We have prior experiences of conducting large-scale vaccination programmes, and hope that people will come to take vaccines."
He also noted that all the stakeholders of the campaign - local government bodies, NGOs, health facilities, volunteers, and law-enforcement agencies - are ready to accomplish the task in a disciplined manner.
"We hope to reach the target of jabbing 70 per cent of the country's people through the nationwide campaign," he added.
The country has so far vaccinated about 64 per cent of its total population with the first dose of antidotes.
As of February 24, a total of 108,448,610 people have received the first dose of vaccines, while the second dose was given to a total of 81,770,135 people.
Besides, booster or third dose of vaccines was given to some 3,548,712 individuals.
So far, Bangladesh has administered vaccines of six brands - AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Sinopharm, Moderna, Sinovac, and Johnson & Johnson.
However, eleven people died of Covid-19 while and 1,406 got infected with the virus afresh in Bangladesh on Friday.
The figures were 10 and 1,516 respectively on Thursday, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
With the latest daily counts, the total fatalities from Covid-19 reached 29,016 in the country since the virus was detected in the country in March 2020,
Some 25,667 samples were tested during the last 24 hours until 8:0am on Friday while 25,702 samples were collected during the period.
The Covid-19 test positivity rate inched down to 5.48 per cent on the day against the previous day's 5.53 per cent.
According to the DGHS, a total of 6,936 people recovered from the coronavirus disease in the country during the last 24-hour reporting time.
The rate of recovery was 92.38 per cent on the day, the DGHS figures revealed.
However, the rate of fatalities from coronavirus disease also moved down to 1.49 per cent on the day compared to that of 1.50 per cent on Thursday.
According to the official data, the total Covid-19 have already exceeded 1.94 million in Bangladesh and over 1.79 million of them had recovered from the deadly disease.
Meanwhile, nearly 13.33 million samples were tested since March last year.
AFP report from Washington adds: The United States is shipping more than 10 million Covid-19 vaccine doses to Bangladesh, making the country the biggest recipient of Washington's global donations, the White House said Friday.
"This is our single largest donation to date and will make Bangladesh our largest recipient of doses," a White House official told AFP.
The latest batch amounts to 10,001,160 Pfizer doses, sent through Covax, the global distribution initiative co-led by public-private partnership Gavi.
Divided into three separate shipments, the donated doses are all due to have arrived by next Monday, starting with an initial 3,187,504 doses on Friday, the official said.
This comes after another 7.4 million doses were sent to Bangladesh just a month ago.
Washington has pledged 1.1 billion shots to the rest of the world-more than any other country-and has already sent vaccines to countries ranging from Guatemala to Papua New Guinea.
The US shots often cross paths with shipments from China and Russia in what has been dubbed "vaccine diplomacy," although the official insisted that the US contributions, by contrast, "do not come with strings attached."
Bangladesh has recorded about 1.9 million Covid-19 cases and more than 29,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. New cases have dropped sharply as the the Omicron variant recedes.
One of the world's poorest countries, Bangladesh has fully vaccinated 47 per cent of its approximately 165 million people.
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