Kinshasa (AFP)
The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has received a batch of more than 50,000 doses of anti-Covid AstraZeneca vaccine offered by Great Britain, after 35 days of out of stock, the Congolese Ministry of Health said on Saturday.
“The Democratic Republic of the Congo has just benefited from a batch of more than 50,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. This is part of the Covax mechanism facility. This batch (...) is offered by the Government of Great Britain ", says the ministry.
"This batch of vaccines will be used to administer the second dose to the majority of people who have already received the first as part of the vaccination launched on April 19, 2021", according to the daily bulletin of the Ministry of Health received on Saturday.
In this huge country of nearly 90 million inhabitants, only 81,910 people had been vaccinated in 13 of the 26 provinces as of July 10, the expiry date of the last available batch of more than 300,000 AstraZeneca vaccines, the only one used in the DRC.
Among them, 4,260 received the second dose, but 77,650 people are waiting for it.
Two other lots had expired at the end of June.
In addition, the number of patients and the lethality having significantly decreased, the curfew is lightened (11 p.m. to 4 a.m. instead of 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.), according to a press release from the Congolese presidency.
Bars, nightclubs and party rooms are allowed to operate before the curfew time, in compliance with barrier measures, "particularly hand washing and wearing masks," the document said.
In early June, the Congolese authorities declared a third wave of Covid-19 in the country characterized by an "exponential" increase in cases of contamination with Indian (Delta) and South African (Beta) variants.
Since the start of the epidemic on March 10, 2020, the DRC has recorded 53,136 cases of Covid-19, including 1,050 deaths, according to figures from the Congolese Ministry of Health.
© 2021 AFP