By A Staff Reporter
Kathmandu, Aug. 9: As the government is intensifying vaccination programme against COVID-19, senior citizens, who were waiting for the second dose of the vaccine, will get the booster dose from Monday.
The country is administering COVID-19 vaccines to more than 150,000 people a day on average over the past few days.

Senior citizens above 65 years old, who were waiting for the second dose of vaccine, will get the booster dose. The second dose of AstraZeneca will be provided to 1.4 million senior citizens and others.
Earlier, they were inoculated with Covishield vaccine of India. The vaccination campaign will be conducted with around 1.8 million doses of the vaccines provided by Bhutanese and Japanese government under COVAX facility.

According to the Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP), 191,339 people were vaccinated in the past 24 hours. The total number of people who have been vaccinated in Nepal with the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine to date has reached 4,442,622. Of these, 2,359,793 have received the second dose as well.

According to the data of MoHP, more than 153,000 people have been receiving their COVID-19 jabs a day on an average.
As many as 191,339 people received their jabs against COVID-19 on Saturday, 120,889 on Friday and 117,119 on Thursday. Likewise, the number of people receiving the vaccine was 115,155 on Wednesday, 198,459 on Tuesday and 181,025 on Monday.

The MoHP is currently administering the second dose of Verocell against COVID-19 across the country. Nepal received its first shipment of the Japanese-made AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines on Saturday and its second shipment has arrived today. The Japanese government is providing 1.6 million doses of vaccine under COVAX facility.
Meanwhile, the MoHP has increased the number of COVID-19 vaccination centres across the country. A total of 1,433 new vaccination centres have been added across the country. With this, the total number of vaccination centres in the country has now reached 4,422.

The Kathmandu Valley alone will have a total of 149 vaccination centres with the MoHP deciding to set up an additional 83 vaccination centres.