Vaccine Imports to Accelerate by Next Week

Vaccine rollout is expected to expedite by next week when larger shipments start to arrive into the country, chairman of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Karim Hemmati, said on Monday. 
“We’ll try to import shipments containing five million jabs into the country to speed up vaccination,” Hemmati was quoted as saying by IRNA.
Hemmati’s organization has managed to bring in 20 million shots of the Chinese Sinopharm in 17 shipments, each time the batch contained a little over one million vaccines. 
The official noted that the IRCS will deliver 20 million jabs by the end of summer, and 60 million more by late November.
“Considering the country’s population of 80 million people, we’ll need to import 180 million doses for two to three shots for each person,” he said.
Iran announced on Monday it had administered 765,000 coronavirus vaccine shots in the past 24 hours, its highest tally since the national vaccination campaign was launched back in February, bringing the total number of doses given out to 26.8 million. 
So far, 18.5 million people have received a first dose and 8.3 million have been fully vaccinated. Iran is aiming to immunize 60 million of its people over the next few months to cut the disease’s death rate.

Deaths Down by 7%

Head of Covid-19 Operations in the province of Tehran, Alireza Zali, said on Monday that fatalities in the region had declined by 7%, compared to a week earlier, as more people are getting vaccinated.
“Statistics show that mortalities have decreased by 7%, ICU patients by 3% and hospitalizations in general wards by 2%,” the health official noted.
Zali said that some 4.650 million shots of coronavirus vaccines had been administered throughout the province. 
“The city of Tehran has the capacity to give 130,000 shots per day,” he added.
Iran is speeding up vaccination to curb a fifth wave of the outbreak driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant. 
The Health Ministry announced on Monday that a further 669 patients had died from the contagion in the past 24 hours, taking the pandemic’s toll to over 107,000.
Some 33,700 got infected with the virus in a 24-hour period, pushing the case tally to 4.960 million. 
At least 306 cities across Iran have been placed on red alert, down by 50 compared to the peak of the disease. 
Around the world, 217.3 million people have been diagnosed with Covid and 4.51 million people have lost their lives to it.