[ad_1]
SEDAN: A 101-year-old woman became the first German to receive a coronavirus vaccine yesterday, a day before the official start of the country’s vaccination campaign, local broadcaster MDR reported.
The woman, from Halberstadt in the Harz mountain range, lives in a nursing home, where 40 residents and 11 staff members were vaccinated, MDR reported.
German Health Minister Jens Spahn said yesterday that trucks were on their way to deliver the vaccine to nursing homes, which are first in line to receive the vaccine.
The federal government plans to distribute more than 1.3 million doses of vaccines to local health authorities by the end of this year and about 700,000 a week starting in January.
“There may be some setbacks at one point or another at the beginning, but that’s quite normal when you start such a logistically complex process,” Spahn said.
Germany, with a population of 83 million, has built more than 400 vaccination centers, including in places like the former Tegel and Tempelhof airports in Berlin and the fairgrounds in Hamburg.
The vaccines will be free and available to everyone from mid-2021, when priority groups are expected to have completed vaccination campaigns. There is no obligation to get vaccinated.
The number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in Germany rose by 14,455 to 1,627,103, data from the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases showed on Saturday. More than 29,000 people in total have died. – Reuters
[ad_2]
