PM Oli to inaugurate vaccination drive on Wednesday; recovery rate 98 %

Kathmandu / Jan 24: The government is launching a vaccination drive against COVID-19 from Wednesday, Jan 27.

During a virtual meeting with the chief ministers of all provinces, Minister for Health and Population, Hridayesh Tripathi said that the government is starting the first phase of the vaccination drive from 10AM Wednesday.

The vaccination drive against COVID-19 will kick off Wednesday after formal inauguration by Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, Minister Tripathi said.

On Thursday, a million doses of the ‘Covishield’ vaccine, manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, arrived in Nepal under a grant assistance of India. The vaccine is jointly developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca – a British-Swedish pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company.

In the first phase of the vaccination drive, frontline workers fighting the pandemic will get shots of ‘Covishied’. The vaccine received by Nepal will be administered to about 500,000 frontline workers, according to the health ministry.

Those receiving vaccines in the first phase include health and sanitation workers, ambulance drivers, hospital staffers, and those managing dead bodies.

In the meantime, the government is also preparing to procure additional COVID-19 vaccines from India.

COVID-19 recovery rate 98%

Kathmandu / Jan. 24: With 270 new cases of the novel coronavirus confirmed on Sunday, the national COVID-19 tally has reached 269,450.

“In 4,413 Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests done in the last 24 hours, 270 persons were found infected with SARS-CoV-2,” informed Dr. Jageshwor Gautam, spokesperson of the Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) in the regular press briefing.

Of the 270 new infections, 133 were recorded in the Kathmandu Valley.

Currently, there are 3,312 active cases of COVID-19 across the nation of which, 2,537 are placed in home isolation and the remaining are receiving treatment in various institutional isolations. Also, 145 persons, mostly those who had returned from abroad, are placed in quarantine.

Meanwhile, 403 COVID-19 patients receiving treatment in institutional isolation or staying in home isolation recovered from the infection in the last 24 hours. Nepal has now recorded 264,137 cases of recoveries and the recovery rate is at 98 per cent.

Moreover, seven persons succumbed to COVID-19 in the last 24 hours, taking Nepal’s COVID-19 death toll to 2,001.