Angola received on Monday 3.5 million doses of the China-made Sinopharm vaccine, having acquired them as part of its battle against Covid-19, the government said
In comments to journalists, the secretary of state for hospitals of Angola, Leonardo Inocêncio, said that the batch would bring the total number of doses of the Sinopharm vaccine acquired from China to 8.5 million.
He said that the vaccines would be used to continue the country’s ongoing vaccination campaign, which aims to achieve 60% coverage of the target population by the end of this year.
“We are at a good pace, but what we wanted to do was appeal to the population to adhere, because we are already at the forty-percent per cent level of this target that we set ourselves,” he said.
Angola on Sunday recorded a cumulative 65,144 confirmed cases of the noval coronavirus that causes Covid-19, with 1,733 deaths associated with the disease and 63,197 people having recovered. There were 214 active cases.
Worldwide, Covid-19 has been associated with at least 5,193,392 deaths, out of more than 260.44 million confirmed coronavirus infections, according to the latest tally calculated by Agence France-Presse.
The disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, first detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
A new variant, Omicron, was recently detected in South Africa and, according to the World Health Organisation, the “high number of mutations” it contains may mean that it is mor contagious.
