COVID-19 cases jump to February highest as vaccination starts

Ukraine has reported 8,147 new COVID-19 infection
cases, 3,889 recoveries, and 135 deaths in the past 24 hours, Ukrainian Health
Minister Maksym Stepanov said on Facebook Feb. 25. The total number of cases of
COVID-19 in Ukraine is 1.326 million, including 25,596 deaths and 1.159 million
recoveries. The daily rate of infections jumped to mid-January figures of more
than 8,000, while it stood around 5,000 after the lockdown Jan. 8-24.

Ukraine launched COVID-19 vaccination on Feb. 24 with
Covishield made in India and has enough vaccine doses for the first and second
stages of the campaign, Stepanov told reporters the day before. “We are
expecting supplies through the COVAX initiative of more than 100,000 doses from
the Pfizer company, around two million doses from Sinovac, 1.5 million doses
from AstraZeneca, another four million doses or so from Serum Institute under
COVAX, a contract for ten million doses from Novavax has already been signed,
and we plan to sign a contract for another five million doses in the near
future,” he said.

Yuri Svirko: On the same
day when Ukraine started its vaccination campaign, Ghana became the first
country in the world to receive coronavirus vaccines through the COVAX
initiative. The 600,000 doses delivered to Ghana were also produced by the
Serum Institute of India, like Covishield received by Ukraine. While vaccines
being sent to low income countries such as Ghana are funded by donations,
Ukraine paid for Covishield.

As other European countries are preparing for the
third wave of COVID-19, seeing rising numbers of cases, we expect Ukraine to
follow suit soon, despite all vaccination efforts. Still, it would be good to
know who will get what out of the vaccine variety described by Stepanov, and
when.