Covid Vaccination: Govt mulling spot registration for seniors
The government is considering an on-the-spot registration provision for senior citizens for Covid-19 vaccination, Secretary to the Health Services Division Abdul Mannan said yesterday.
Mannan made the remark while replying to a query from journalists when he was visiting the BSMMU vaccination center.
People, aged 40 and above, and front liners are being vaccinated in the first phase of the nationwide drive.
The registration for Covid-19 vaccines drastically fell yesterday as the server of the surokkha.gov.bd went down.
On Thursday, Health Minister Zahid Maleque said there would be no on-the-spot registration.
Some 1.6 lakh people registered online for the vaccine since 2:30pm yesterday, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
Yesterday, renowned columnist Syed Abul Maksud got inoculated at the BSMMU centre.
After taking the vaccine, Syed Abul Maksud told the journalists, "To stay safe, we all have to take vaccines when we get a chance. The fear about the vaccine is unnecessary."
In the previous 24 hours, more than 1.7 lakh registered.
Vaccination was continuing for the sixth day yesterday after a weekly holiday on the previous day.
A total of 194,371 people were vaccinated till yesterday.
Some 1.6 lakh registered in the previous 24 hours till 2:30pm yesterday. With this, the total number of people registered rose to 1,492,345.
The mass inoculation campaign began on February 7.
Since then, the number of people showing up at the centres, especially those in Dhaka, to take the first dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has increased.
The government launched the vaccination campaign with 70 lakh doses in hand. It is expected to get the second installment of 50 lakh shots from Serum Institute of India (SII) later this month.
Around the same time, another 1.31 lakh doses under the COVAX programme are scheduled to arrive here.
The government has purchased three crore doses of the vaccine from SII.
"TRANSMISSION NOW LIMITED IN CLUSTER"
Experts, meanwhile, said that coronavirus transmission has slowed down to "cluster transmission" from "community transmission" as the positivity rate was below five percent for 24th consecutive day yesterday since January 20.
Against a total of 12,871 tests in the past 24 hours till 8:00am yesterday, the positivity rate was 2.26 percent while the overall positivity rate was 14.09 percent.
"We can say the community transmission of novel coronavirus has stopped nowadays. The transmission is limited in clusters," Mushtuq Hussain, consultant of the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) told The Daily Star yesterday.
In the same 24 hours, 13 people died from Covid-19, according to a press release issued by the DGHS.
With this, the total number of deaths reached 8,266 and the death rate was 1.53 percent.
With 291 new infections yesterday, the total number of confirmed cases rose to 540,266.
At least 374 Covid-19 patients have recovered during the same 24 hours.
With this, the total number of recoveries rose to 486,767, and the recovery rate at 90.10 percent.
Among the five deceased, seven were males.
One of them was aged between 21 and 30 years, one between 31 and 40, one between 41 and 50, four were between 51 and 60, and six were above 60 years, added the release.
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