Roughly two million people working in jobs with relatively high-risk for COVID-19 transmission in Beijing have been vaccinated before the upcoming Chinese New Year (CNY) holiday, local health experts estimated.
The capital announced on Tuesday to have basically completed coronavirus vaccine inoculations among nine local priority groups.
The priority groups include medical staff and workers in cold-chain, food, logistics, quarantine inspection and public affairs sectors such as sanitation, nursing and firefighting, and people who will go abroad for business or private reasons, explained health authorities.
The recent inoculations in Beijing may cover about two million local people belonging to these groups, a Beijing-based public health scholar told the Global Times on Tuesday. “It’s nonetheless hard to calculate an accurate number,” he said.
All the high-risk groups in Beijing had received their first doses by January 19, People’s Daily reported on January 21. The number of people vaccinated surpassed 1.9 million at that time, it said.
According to an inoculation plan that Beijing released earlier, the city scheduled to complete vaccinations among the nine priority groups ahead of the CNY holiday, and expand the vaccine campaign to include other people after the festival, taking the country’s COVID-19 vaccine allocation and supply situations into account.
A staff member displays a sample of the COVID-19 inactivated vaccine at a vaccine production plant of China National Pharmaceutical Group Co., Ltd. (Sinopharm) in Beijing. (Xinhua/Zhang Yuwei)
