COVID-19: Nigeria Vaccinates Over 20,000 People In 24hours

The National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) says 20,250 Nigerian residents have received jabs of the COVID-19 vaccine between Thursday and Friday.

Faisal Shuaib, the NPHCDA Executive Director, disclosed this during a Joint press conference with the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Friday in Abuja.

The press conference was aimed at updating Nigerians on the status of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign as of April I6.

The update comes barely 24 hours after 1,051,096 of the targeted population were reported to have taken the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

“As of today, April 16th, 1,071,346 representing 53.2% of the eligible persons targeted with the AstraZeneca vaccine have been administered their first dose in this vaccination phase.”

“It is important to note that these data are based on reports received from states through the Electronic Management of Immunization Data (EMID) system only and do not take into account vaccinations that are not yet captured in the system,” Shuaib said.

According to Shuaib, factors including delay in information upload by the states, network problems and high traffic of those coming in to take their shots of the vaccine had constrained real-time data of vaccinated Nigerians.

He, however, encouraged its teams in different states to, “deploy the most suitable internet service for their locations in order to speed up the data entry process” while we continue to optimize their registration & immunization data system to have “actual number of vaccinated people at any given time”.

The NPHCDA boss further said: “In many states, we have completed inoculating frontline health workers & are now offering vaccination to the elderly, particularly those that are 65 years & above. We are glad to be able to progress quickly offer immunization to more members of the community.

“Our rollout has been marked by safety, efficiency, best practice, and speed. I want to take this opportunity to thank all our health workers for their incredible and tireless commitment to making this work.

“The National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) & its development partners, have a platform of Senior Supervisors that engage in daily evening review meetings to determine the status of the COVID-19 vaccine implementation in all States and the FCT.

“These meetings are an opportunity to get reports from the sub-national level on how the campaigns are proceeding, what challenges they face, how we can pro-actively anticipate and resolve any impending challenges and also troubleshoot to address real life operational hurdles to our execution plans.

“We have been careful to ensure that only those who are eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine in the current phase are being vaccinated.

“These include health workers and their support staff, other frontline workers, strategic leaders and in the last few days, we have also included those who meet the age requirements.”