The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) reported 550 new cases of COVID-19 Tuesday.
In a Twitter update via its verified handle, the government agency said there are now 70,195 confirmed cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus in Nigeria.
A total number of 65,110 people it said, have so far been discharged from hospital, while the number of deaths so far is 1,182.
South Africa remained the hardest-hit nation in Africa, with more than 821,000 reported cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday — up 4,000 from the day before — and more than 22,000 deaths, according to the CBC.
As of Tuesday, there were more than 68 million cases of COVID-19 reported worldwide, with more than 43.7 million of those considered recovered or resolved, according to a coronavirus tracking tool maintained by Johns Hopkins University. The global death toll stood at more than 1.5 million.
In Europe, a retired British shop clerk received the first shot in the country’s COVID-19 vaccination programme Tuesday, the start of an unprecedented global immunisation effort intended to offer a route out of a pandemic that has killed 1.5 million.
Margaret Keenan, who turns 91 next week, got the shot at 6:31 a.m. local time on what public health officials have dubbed “V-Day.”
She was first in line at University Hospital Coventry, one of several hospitals around the country that are handling the initial phase of the United Kingdom’s program. As luck would have it, the second injection went to a man named William Shakespeare, an 81-year-old who hails from Warwickshire, the county where the Bard was born.
The UK is the first Western country to start a mass vaccination program after British regulators last week authorized the use of a COVID-19 shot developed by U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech. U.S. and European Union regulators may approve the vaccine in coming days, fueling a global immunization effort.
Britain has reportedly received 800,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, enough to vaccinate 400,000 people. The first shots will go to people over 80 who are either hospitalized or already have outpatient appointments scheduled, along with nursing home workers and vaccination staff. Others will have to wait their turn.