TUNISIA – Tunisia has received a Qatari donation of medical equipment in addition to a field hospital with 200 beds and 100 artificial respirators, to help combat the calamity that has befallen the country due to Covid-19.
“This field hospital will be installed as soon as possible in the southern suburb of the capital in order to take care of COVID-19 patients and try to curb the spread of the pandemic in this region,” the statement by the Secretary General of the government Walid Dhahbi said.
The Qatari ambassador to Tunisia, Saad Bin Nasser Hamidi, expressed the common will shared between the officials of the two countries to promote bilateral relations especially in this period of pandemic.
The total number of COVID-19 cases rose to 473,229 in Tunisia after 8,315 new cases were added, while the death toll from the virus increased by 126 to 15,861, on Thursday, leading to government announcing that hospitals were overwhelmed.
Yesterday, Tunisia reported record daily coronavirus deaths with 189 new fatalities, bringing the death toll from the virus to 16,050.
New infections in the North African country rose by 8,506 to 481,735, according to the latest figures released by the Health Ministry.
The total number of recoveries reached 378,917, while the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients reached 4,345, including 643 in intensive care units.
A total of 1,895,679 lab tests have been carried out in Tunisia so far, according to the ministry.
Since the start of the national vaccination campaign against the coronavirus on March 13, a total of 2,082,765 people have received the vaccines, with 614,710 having received two doses, according to the ministry.
Tunisia is among many other African nations facing a rough time due to the third wave, which WHO reported to have exceeded the second wave peak.
Africa has so far reported 5,869,127 cases, 150,483 coronavirus related fatalities and 5,067,406 recoveries, according to data published by Africa CDC. Over 37,004,431 vaccines have been administered in the continent.
The continent’s hardest-hit country South Africa has announced it will start vaccinating people under 50 years old as it buckles under a vicious third wave of COVID-19 infections driven by the Delta variant.
“We are aiming to start vaccinating the 35 to 49 age group from August 1,” acting Health Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane told a weekly media briefing.
With more than 2.1 million detected coronavirus cases, South Africa accounts for 37 percent of the continent’s infections, followed far behind by Morocco and Tunisia with nine and eight percent respectively, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Infections are rapidly rising, with a pandemic-high 26,485 recorded on Saturday alone. On Thursday it saw 22,910 new cases and 460 deaths, taking its total number of fatalities to 63,499.
Around four million of South Africa’s 59 million population have received at least a first dose at one of nearly 2,600 vaccination sites.
“We have reached 5.6 percent of the population, obviously way too little to reach herd immunity,” said Nicholas Crisp, the health ministry’s deputy director-general.
The government recently approved the use of Chinese vaccines Sinovac and Sinopharm, which joined the Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson jabs in the country’s rollout. It is targeting a rate of 250,000 vaccinations daily.
