The Ethiopian government on Monday said it would receive 300,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses from China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm) on Tuesday, reported Reuters.
Ethiopian Health Minister Lia Tadesse told Reuters that the Sinopharm doses are the first shots the country has secured outside the global COVAX vaccine-sharing initiative.
COVAX is co-led by the GAVI alliance the World Health Organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and the U.N. Children’s Fund. It secures and distributes vaccines for underdeveloped and poor countries.
Earlier this month, Ethiopia received nearly 2.2 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, through COVAX. The country’s health workers are being inoculated in the first phase of the vaccine drive.
In February, the Ethiopian health minister said the government hoped to inoculate at least a fifth of the country’s 110 million people by the end of the year.
The Health Ministry said 1,982 new COVID-19 cases have been registered in the past 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 202,545 as of Monday evening. The ministry said 24 new deaths from the coronavirus were reported across the country, bringing the national death toll to 2,825. It added that 867 people recovered from COVID-19 during the same period, taking the count to 155,190.
Ethiopia has reported the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the East Africa region and has the fourth largest COVID-19 caseload in Africa, which accounts for 4.1 percent of global COVID-19 cases.
According to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ethiopia’s COVID-19 cases accounted for about 5 percent of the African continent’s total confirmed cases.
Currently, Africa’s second-most populous nation has some 44,528 active coronavirus cases, of which 795 are under severe health conditions, the ministry said. The country has conducted 2,340,575 COVID-19 tests so far, including 7,840 tests in the past 24 hours.
