Pakistan has so far administered 10 million doses of coronavirus vaccines, said National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) chief Asad Umar on Wednesday.
Addressing a media conference in Islamabad, Umar said the government’s strategy to arrest the spread of coronavirus has been a success.
Earlier, Asad had taken to Twitter to announce that Pakistan will cross the 10,000,000 doses mark today.
He said the more quickly we get ourselves vaccinated, the faster we will be able to rid ourselves of this menace.
He requested people to get themselves vaccinated so that business could reopen and life could return to its normal state in Pakistan.
Umar said the government as well as the masses had done a commendable job in following coronavirus SOPs as a result of which the number of cases has been dropping.
Meanwhile, the NCOC took decisions to relax certain restrictions from June 15 which are as follows:
• Restriction on closure of two days a week will be relaxed to one day. Choice of day will be at the discretion of federating units.
• Partial opening of indoor gyms for vaccinated members only.
• Only selective non-contact sports will be permitted, while ban on contact sports (karate, boxing, rugby, kabaddi, wrestling, water polo).
• Restrictions on festivals, cultural and other events will remain in place.
• Ban on closure of shrines will remain imposed.
• Cinemas will remain closed.
• Existing 50% work from home policy will be relaxed to 100 % office attendance.
• Two days weekly ban on inter-provincial transport will be lifted.
• Restriction regarding 50% occupancy for public transport will be relaxed to 70% occupancy.
• Current Restrictions already announced by NCOC regarding recreation, education sector, mask wearing SOP, railways and inbound passengers’ policy will remain in place till further orders.
The NCOC meeting reviewed the vaccination campaign and decided that:
• All vaccination centres will remain open from 8am to 10pm daily from June 11 (except Sunday).
• Vaccination centres will remain open on Friday instead of Sunday.
• From June 11 onwards 18 years+ citizens will be able to avail the walk-in facility in vaccination centres.
• NCOC is in the process of developing IT based solutions for verification of vaccination certificates which shall be completed by the end of June.
On mass vaccination campaign, the NCOC said:
• Countrywide mass vaccination campaign will be run under three-pronged strategy, that is;
• Voluntarily; Vaccination by all citizens,
• Obligatory; for public and private sectors employees. In this regard all public sector employees will have to be vaccinated by 30 June 2021,
• Incentivised; for which NCOC is considering to introduce certain incentives for various sectors to encourage vaccination.
Asad Umar said that when Pakistanis decide to do something, they do it.
He said that we have been vaccinating an estimated 300,000 people daily.
The federal minister said that while it was an impressive achievement, the government wanted to expedite the campaign and vaccinate 70 million people by the end of the year.
