PH gets 500K more Sinovac vaccines from China

The national government received another 500,000 doses of procured CoronaVac vaccines from Chinese manufacturer Sinovac Biotech yesterday.

Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr., chief implementer of the National Task Force (NTF) Against COVID-19, accepted the Chinese vaccines during the arrival ceremony at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal 2 in Pasay City.

A Philippine Airlines (PAL) A330 commercial plane with registry number RP-C8789 picked up the Chinese vaccines from

Beijing and arrived at NAIA Terminal 2 at 5:18 p.m., ahead of its scheduled arrival at 5:55 p.m.

From NAIA, the vaccines were loaded into two refrigerated vans and transported to Metropac Cold Storage facility in Marikina City prior to their distribution to hospitals.

The delivery of the 500,000 doses of Sinovac vaccines were fewer compared to the original target supply earlier set by the government. Last April 6, Galvez said the country was expecting the delivery of 1.5 million Sinovac doses for this month.

With the recent delivery, the country has now obtained 3,025,600 vaccine doses. Around 1.5 million doses were already deployed to hospitals nationwide.

The delivered vaccines are expected to be allocated to high-risk areas where there is a surge of coronavirus disease infections, including the National Capital Region, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal (NCR Plus).

A total of 25 million doses of Sinovac vaccines were secured by the government from China which will be delivered in batches.

The first batch of procured one million doses of Sinovac vaccines was delivered last March 29.

55,000 recoveries

A new record-high in recoveries among coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients has been set on Sunday, April 11.

This, after the Department of Health (DOH) reported 55,204 new recoveries.

The number surpassed the previous record of 41,205 recoveries logged on Easter Sunday, April 4.

With more than 50,000 new recoveries, the cumulative recovery count climbed to 703,404.

The number of COVID-19 cases in the country also rose to 864,868 with 11,681 new cases.

The April 11 case bulletin of the DOH also showed 201 new deaths, bringing the total deaths to 14,945.

Of the 146,519 active cases, the DOH said 96.8 percent were mild, 1.7 percent were asymptomatic, 0.5 were percent critical, 0.6 percent were severe, and 0.34 percent were moderate.

The DOH said 22 duplicates were removed from the total case count, saying seven were recoveries.

"Moreover, 13 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation," the Health department said.

The DOH said six labs were not able to submit their data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System (CDRS) on April 10, 2021.