All to be fully vaccinated by Dec: Maleque

Health Minister Zahid Maleque on Monday said all the people of the country will get the two doses of vaccines and the booster one against Covid-19 by December as per the target.

Mentioning Bangladesh’s success in its vaccination campaign, he said around 10 crore people in the country have been inoculated so far. The government has so far spent more than Tk 20,000 crore on vaccinating people of the country, the minister said while talking to reporters at the secretariat.

“About 70 per cent of people have been inoculated. Among them, around 6.75 crore people have received the second doses and 26 lakh people got the booster shots.”

Zahid Maleque said there are 10 crore doses of vaccines in stock while Bangladesh received a total of 27 crore vaccine doses. The country will have extra vaccine stocks even after vaccinating all people, he said.

“The government is not finding people to vaccinate,” he said.

The minister urged all to get vaccinated as the mortality rate declined among the vaccinated patients.

Meanwhile, the country logged 38 coronavirus-related deaths in the last 24 hours till Monday morning, taking the total death toll from the disease to 28,627. The fresh figure of fatalities was the highest in a day since September 20 last year. Among the new deceased, 28 were men and 10 women.

Sixteen deaths were reported in Dhaka division, six in Chattogram, five each in Rajshahi and Khulna, three in Sylhet, two in Mymensingh, and one in Rangpur.

The country also recorded another 9,369 new cases of Covid-19, with the country’s daily test positivity rate standing at 21.07 per cent.

With the fresh infections, the total number of cases reached 18,70,901 since the country detected its first cases on March 8, 2020. On Sunday, the positivity rate stood at 21.50 per cent. The daily infection rate (33.37 per cent) reached its peak on January 28 this year.

Health authorities reported the latest figures after testing 44,471 samples at 868 laboratories across the country. Bangladesh has so far tested 1,27,70,880 samples.

Meanwhile, 9,507 patients recovered from the deadly infection in the last 24 hours, raising the overall recovery to 16,12,057.