By A Staff Reporter
Kathmandu, Dec. 14: With COVID-19 crisis continuing to spread rapidly across the globe, every virus-affected country is racing after the COVID-19 vaccine. In a bid to ensure availability of the vaccine to all citizens, the Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) has started required work and consultation.
As no vaccine has been made for children below 14 years old, which accounts for 28 per cent of population, 72 per cent of the population need to be immunised, said Dr. Jageshwor Gautam, spokesperson at the MoHP.
“Vaccines for 20 per cent population will be provided by the World Health Organisation under its COVAX programme,” said Dr. Gautam and added that works were underway to secure accessibility of vaccines for rest of the population after it becomes available for use.
Dr. Gautam informed that the ministry had formed eight technical committees, vaccine consultation committee and experts committee for the collaboration, management and communication to avail vaccine for all the citizens.
The affordable and quality vaccine will be made available with the consultation and advice of this team, he added.
1,500 new recoveries, 9 fatalities recorded
Nepal has continued to witness more recoveries compared to daily infection caseload in the recent days and weeks.
The MoHP confirmed that 1,500 COVID-19 patients recovered across the country while 830 new infections and nine COVID-19 related deaths were recorded in the last 24 hours.
Nepal’s national recovery tally has reached 235,731 so far. The national recovery rate now stands at 94.89 per cent while the fatality rate is 0.68 per cent.
With today’s new cases, the national COVID-19 caseload has reached 248,423, including 85,741 females and 161,852 males, according to the latest MoHP tally.
Of the 5,242 Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests conducted in the last 24 hours, 348 were reported in Kathmandu Valley’s three districts.
Meanwhile, Nepal’s COVID-19 death toll has now reached 1,698 with nine new fatalities confirmed in the past 24 hours.
Also, as per the latest district-wise data by MoHP, three districts - Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Kaski - have over 500 active cases of infected people while two districts - Manang and Dolpa - have zero active cases.
Currently, there are 10,994 active cases of COVID-19 and 516 persons are placed in quarantine.
Among the total active cases, 6,232 are in home isolation across the seven states, 294 patients are admitted to the intensive care units (ICU) of hospitals, and 52 are receiving treatment with ventilator support.
Nepal has so far conducted 1,831,041 Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests over the past months since January.