The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) reported 1,565 new infections of COVID-19 Thursday.
In a Twitter update via its verified handle, the government agency said there are now 95, 934 confirmed cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus in Nigeria.
A total of 77, 982 people it stated, have so far been discharged from hospital, while the number of deaths so far is 1,330.
As of early Thursday, more than 87.3 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with 48.8 million of those cases considered recovered or resolved, according to a COVID-19 case tracking tool maintained by Johns Hopkins University. The global death toll stood at more than 1.8 million.
CBC reports that COVID-19 vaccine deliveries under the COVAX facility co-ordinated by the World Health Organization to support lower-income countries could start this month, WHO immunization director Kate O’Brien said on Thursday.
“We need about $7 billion in order to deliver enough vaccines to these countries through the end of 2021. The facility has already raised about $6 billion of the $7 billion,” she told an online social media event.
In the Americas, the US COVID-19 case count stood at more than 21.3 million on Thursday, with more than 361,000 deaths. Hospitalizations surged in the U.S. as the historic vaccination effort lagged.
The US reported more than 3,800 COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins. The New York Times, which has also been tracking COVID-19 cases in the US, put the figure even higher, at 3,964.
Mexico saw one of the biggest daily rises in cases and deaths, while health authorities said a doctor who had a serious allergic reaction after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine remained hospitalised.
Brazil is ready to begin vaccinating its population this month, and the country has secured a total of 354 million vaccine doses for 2021.
South Africa set out plans to vaccinate 40 million people, or two-thirds of its population, in a bid to achieve herd immunity, as a mutant variant drove daily new cases above 21,000 for the first time.
South African officials said the country will import 1.5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to inoculate the country’s health workers. It’s the nation’s first announcement of the purchase of a COVID-19 vaccine. It comes as record highs of 21,832 new confirmed cases and 844 deaths were registered Wednesday.
The health minister said the first one million doses will be delivered later this month from the Serum Institute of India, followed by 500,000 doses in February.
South Africa, with 60 million people, has reported more than 1.1 million confirmed infections. That represents more than 30 per cent of all cases on the 54-nation continent of 1.3 billion people.
Kenya’s health minister, meanwhile, said the country is expected to start receiving 24 million doses next month of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, as countries in sub-Saharan Africa begin to announce progress in obtaining the desperately needed vaccines.
