The Philippines reached a “milestone” as the country hit its highest vaccination rate of 353,000 jabs in a single day, Covid-19 testing czar Secretary Vivencio “Vince” Dizon reported on Thursday.
“Today, we hit a milestone, we hit our highest jab rate in one day [we reached] 353,000 yesterday [Wednesday, June 23],” Dizon said at a news briefing during the vaccination site visit of the National Task Force (NTF) Against Covid-19 and the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF)
with medical experts from Israel at the Lakeshore Mega Vaccination Hub in Taguig City.
“That is really an achievement,” an elated Dizon said, noting that for National Capital Region (NCR), they have reached 167,000 jabs in a single day. The target for NCR is around 120,000, while for the whole country, the government aims to vaccinate 500,000 per day.
With the arrival of 2 million doses of Sinovac vaccine on Thursday from Beijing and additional vaccine doses in the coming days, the testing czar expressed optimism that the vaccine rollout will reach many people in the coming days.
Meanwhile, the three Israeli experts, who arrived in Manila on Sunday to assist the country’s Covid-19 response, were impressed at how the Philippine government was able to handle the challenges, especially in delivering the vaccines, as they noted that the country consists of over 7,000 islands.
“The challenges the Philippines are facing are enormous in terms of geographic situation. So, I don’t think it’s so much of a strategy or more of things to build together,” Dr. Adam Nicholas Segal said.
With this kind of situation, Dr. Dafna Segol, on the other hand, said that the best way is to use a “combination of strategies [especially on] shipment in chilled solution.”
For his part, Health Secretary Francisco T. Duque III said, “The allocation plan always considers the capacity the adequacy of the correct storage temperature.”
Duque also thanked the medical experts from Israel.
“Thank you for sharing your manifold best practices. They are here to observe, but beyond observation, they will share with us what they have done. We certainly need to learn a lot from them.
Meanwhile, Taguig City Mayor Edgardo Cayetano assured that they are exerting all efforts to increase the city’s vaccination capacity and reach 70 percent of the city’s population in October to help reach the target of the national government to vaccinate 70 percent of the country’s population by November to achieve herd immunity.
Covid cases
The total number of Covid-19 cases in the country rose to 1,378,260 after
6,043 additional infections were recorded on Thursday.
There were also 4,486 recoveries and 108 deaths.
Of the total number of cases, 3.7 percent (51,410) are active, 94.5 percent (1,302,814) have recovered, and 1.74 percent (24,036) have died.
Fifteen duplicates were removed from the total case count. Of these, 9 are recoveries.
Moreover, 44 cases previously tagged as recoveries have been validated to be active cases and 61 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
All laboratories were operational on June 22, 2021 but 1 lab was not able to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.
Based on data in the last 14 days, the 1 non-reporting lab contributes, on average, 0.35 percent of samples tested and 0.24 percent of positive individuals.