A thrid shipment of the Moderna bivalent COVID-19 vaccine arrived in Taiwan, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday as it denied rumors about the nation’s fatality rate from the disease.
The shipment of 787,000 doses, expiring on March 28 next year, arrived yesterday evening, the center said.
The first batch of the vaccine completed lot release testing and the doses were allocated to local governments on Saturday, said Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who is the CECC’s spokesman.
Photo: CNA
On the first day of the rollout of the second-generation vaccine, it was administered in 11 cities or counties to 4,469 people, he said.
More cities and counties would start administering the vaccine in the coming days, he added.
As of Saturday, the nation’s first and second dose vaccination rates had reached 93.6 percent and 87.5 percent respectively, while the first and second booster vaccination rates had reached 73 percent and 10.5 percent respectively, he said.
Taiwan yesterday reported 38,785 new local COVID-19 cases, 195 imported cases and 34 deaths from the disease, the CECC said.
The daily caseload increased slightly by 1.8 percent from the previous day, but decreased 1.4 percent from Sunday last week, it added.
Meanwhile, a Chinese-language media outlet yesterday cited a political pundit as saying that Taiwan’s COVID-19 case numbers in the past week were extraordinarily high, with a fatality rate 10 times higher than in Singapore and three times higher than in Hong Kong.
Chuang said the statement was false, citing Taiwan’s case fatality rate of 0.17 percent, compared with Singapore’s 0.09 percent and Hong Kong’s 0.57 percent.
As of Saturday, Taiwan had 457.3 COVID-19-related deaths per 1 million people since the pandemic began, compared with 266.2 in Singapore and 1,343.2 in Hong Kong, he said.
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