Lebanon Sees 60 COVID Deaths, 2,879 Cases as It Sets Vaccination Date

By Staff, Agencies

Lebanon registered 60 new coronavirus deaths and 2,879 more cases Tuesday, as the caretaker prime minister's office said the country's inoculation campaign would be launched Feb. 14.

The cases were detected among 18,571 tests. The positivity rate of the tests in the last two weeks stood at 21.6 percent.

The total number of cases since the virus was first detected in the country in late February 2020 rose to 324,869 according to the Health Ministry. The total number of fatalities stands at 3,737.

The Lebanese Health Ministry said 2,285 patients were in hospital for COVID-19, with 911 in ICUs and 313 on ventilators.

Lebanese authorities Monday began easing a total lockdown imposed to curb the dangerous spread of the virus, after January recorded the worst spread of the disease.

The first stage of the government’s four-part plan went into effect Monday, with supermarkets finally opening their doors for customers, banks operating at 20 percent intake capacity and some factories resuming operations.

Meanwhile, caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab's media office said in a statement that the first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines would arrive late Saturday and the inoculation campaign would be launched Sunday.

The first shipment from Pfizer-BioNTech consists of 28,080 vaccines from a total of 2.1 million doses reserved by the Lebanese government with similar weekly shipments into late March. A shipment of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jabs is also expected to arrive in March.

The Health Ministry has said it would be receiving a total of 249,000 jabs by the end of March with a further 350,000 vaccines in the second quarter and 800,000 in the third quarter.