Staff Reporter
Islamabad
Federal Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry has announced that the cabinet committee has decided to buy the Coronavirus vaccine from Sinopharm, a Chinese company.
Fawad Chaudhry, in a tweet on Thursday, said that initially 1.2 million doses of the vaccine will be imported in first quarter of 2021 and frontline workers will be inoculated for free.
He further said that private sector is also allowed to import internationally approved coronavirus vaccines.
Meanwhile, Pakistan reported 2,475 new coronavirus cases during the past 24 hours, showed the latest data released by National Command and Operation Centre on Thursday morning.
It is the highest daily count in the last 13 days. As a result, the total number of cases in the country has increased to 479,715.
On the other hand, there were 58 more deaths during the same period, raising the overall toll to 10,105, just a day after Pakistan reached another grim milestone by crossing the mark of 10,000 deaths.
Punjab and Sindh continued recording most of the deaths as another 31 and 13 people died of the virus in the two provinces respectively on Wednesday. They were followed by 11 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and one each in Islamabad, Balochistan and Azad Kashmir. After the addition of deaths reported on Wednesday, the overall figures for all the provinces/regions are given as: Punjab 4,013, Sindh 3,533, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 1,638, Islamabad 416, Azad Kashmir 221, Balochistan 183 and Gilgit-Baltistan 101.
Similarly, the region-wise distribution of the coronavirus cases now stands at: Sindh 214,425, Punjab 137,949, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 58,379, Islamabad 37,702, Balochistan 18,148, Azad Kashmir 8,256 and Gilgit-Baltistan 4,856.
Meanwhile, the number of active cases in the country further reduced to 34,537 from the previous level of 37,080 after another 4,960 persons fully recovered from the infection, raising the overall number to 435,073. Hence, the number of closed cases [death + people recovering from infection] in Pakistan now stands at 445,178.
It means Pakistan has witnessed over 4,500 people recovering from the infection on two consecutive days. Earlier, the number of active cases had crossed 51,000 at one point during the second wave of this deadly pandemic.
