Over 0.5m vaccine doses injected on July 12: Umar
Staff Reporter Islamabad
The National Command and Op-erations Centres (NCOC) on Tues-day announced that it has decided to call in the Pakistan Army for the im-plementation of C0vid-19 SOPs.
International flight operations will be increased to 50% from July 15, the NCOC said in a statement, adding: “The decision to increase interna-tional flight opera-tions has been made to repatriate Pakistanis stranded abroad.”
The move to in-crease flight opera-tions will allow the government to bring back 2,500-3,000 Pakistanis every day, and all the airports and relevant authorities have been directed to make necessary arrangements to accommodate the passengers, the fo-rum said.
Meanwhile, Chairman NCOC Asad Umar on Tuesday said the country, for the first time, administered more than half a million Covid-19 vaccine jabs in a single day on July 12.
“For the first time we crossed half a million doses of vaccination yester-day. 5 lakh 25 thousand doses were administered yesterday,” Umar said on Twitter.
“Highest ever first dose was also achieved yesterday with 3 lakh 90 thousand first doses administered”.
Umar expressed hope that the pace will increase in the coming days. Last week, the minister said 20.6pc of people above the age of 50 in Pakistan have been administered at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose.
He elaborated that there are 20.7 mil-lion people in the country who are 50 years of age or older, and out of those, 5.6 million people have re-ceived the first anti-covid jab.
Umar urged people to encourage those in the age group to vaccinate as soon as possible as this “age group is most vulnerable to seri-ous health effects of Covid”.
