Spokesperson Aso Hawezy told Rudaw’s Dilbixwin Dara and Shaho Amin on Sunday that the doses for the Kurdistan Region are to arrive “tomorrow”, and are part of 50,000 vaccine doses China is giving to Iraq.
One thousand of the vaccine doses will be given to Chinese workers in the Kurdistan Region, Hawezy said, and priority for the remaining doses will be given to medical teams, local security forces, the elderly, and the chronically ill.
China’s embassy in Baghdad said on February 4 that it was donating 50,000 vaccines to Iraq.
Iraq’s Ministry of Health has approved the use of vaccines produced by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Sinopharm. Iraq is also part of COVAX, a World Health Organization-led scheme to supply vaccines to developing nations. Baghdad has paid more than $169 million dollars for 16 million doses through COVAX.
“If not this week, the next week, the AstraZeneca will arrive in Iraq as well – an estimated 1.5 million doses,” Hawezy said.
The Kurdistan Region is to receive a roughly 20 percent share of the incoming AstraZeneca delivery.
AstraZeneca deliveries for 2021 “will be done step by step”, he said, with 16 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, enough for eight million people in Iraq, to be delivered by the end of the year.
The number of coronavirus cases recorded in the Kurdistan Region each day are on the rise. The KRG health ministry announced on Sunday that 237 cases of the virus had been recorded in a single day. The ministry announced on Monday that the Kurdistan Region has recorded 109,151 coronavirus cases since the beginning of the pandemic.
Because of the rise in coronavirus cases, health guidelines “are getting more strict,” Governor of Erbil Omed Khoshnaw said in a press conference on Monday – though he denied that lockdowns of the extent seen last spring will happen again.
Hawezy claimed that around 10 percent of the coronavirus cases now being recorded in the Kurdistan Region are from people studying and working at schools, which reopened in early February.
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