The Department of Health (DOH) on Tuesday said that the donated Pfizer vaccines from the World Heath Organization-led Covax facility will be distributed in the National Capital Region (NCR), Cebu City, Davao City, and Quirino for the priority groups A1 to A3.
For NCR, 128, doses will be allocated, the cities of Davao and Cebu will both get 29,250 doses each, Quirino (1,170), and 4,680 doses as buffer.
These areas mentioned have ultra-low temperature freezers for Pfizer vaccine that needs to be kept in minus 70 degrees Celsius.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire, on the other hand, assured the public not to worry about vaccines that will be expiring in the coming months.
Vergeire explained that the vaccines could last up to 6 months.
She revealed that the doses of AstraZeneca vaccine that were received recently will expire in June (1.5 million doses) while the rest in July.
“[The] WHO has committed that they will be providing additional AstraZeneca vaccines by the end of May or first week of June,” she assured stressing that the expected doses will be allocated for the second dose.
Covid cases
On Tuesday the DOH logged 4,734 additional cases, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 1,113,547.
The DOH clarified that the low number of cases recorded was due to the failure of 12 laboratories to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.
There were 7,837 recoveries and 59 deaths that were also reported.
Of the total number of cases, 5.1 percent (56,752) are active, 93.2 percent (1,038,175) have recovered, and 1.67 percent (18,620) have died.
Moreover, 19 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
All labs were operational on May 9, 2021.
