The Ministry of Health has announced that the country has detected an Indian Variant of Covid 19.
Speaking during a Covid 19 update, Permanent Secretary for Technical Services Dr. Kennedy Malama said involved is a 42-year-old man who traveled from India to Zambia
DR Malama has however assured the nation that appropriate measures have been taken to ensure that the concerned individual is put in proper quarantine
And Dr. Malama has announced that the country has reserved the available doses of AstraZeneca vaccine for those who got the first dose because of the prevailing situation in India.
“India has prioritized the use of AstraZeneca to its Citizens. This has affected the production of AstraZeneca vaccine for export, and countries world over including Zambia are likely to encounter challenges in the acquisitions of AstraZeneca from the Covax Facility,” He said.
He said the decision to reserve the Vaccine is only a temporal measure.
Meanwhile, DR Malama has revealed that the Ministry administered 5,442 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine in the last 24 hours.
“The cumulative number of those vaccinated to date is 120,409 of which 114,677 are AstraZeneca and 5,522 are sinopharm doses respectively,’ He said.
With regards to the Covid 19 situation, DR Malama said the country recorded 60 new cases of Covid 19 and 2 deaths in the last 24 hours.
I MENTIONED THAT IS WAS SUSPECTED HERE TWO WEEKS AGO
GOOD YOU HAVE CONFIRMED BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
THERE SHOULD BE DAILY BRIEFING LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD AND AFRICA
It is a relief that the system is able to identify the variant strain of covid-19. That is important to device methods of dealing with it. Well done Dr Malama and team.
It was just a matter of time and Zambia is not even the only country where this variant has been detected. It’s already in at least 50 other countries. Then there’s also the Brazilian, South African and British variants.. no one can even tell which one is more dangerous. Pharmacists would like us believe that their vaccines are effective against all variants but I doubt because they’re now saying you’ll need to refreshen your jabs every year.
Bottom line: stop panicking and just continue with your lives. Better still, try to come up with your own remedy or else you’ll ALWAYS be at the mercy of the West. What did you build schools and universities for anyway???
It’s an air borne virus so it will happen. What matters most is how we manage it. We have done very well so far even better than the so called Rich countries which are keeping those hateful upnd diasporans. Instead of fighting inequality of the black man there abroad some of them spend their time writing articles about me, a man who is comfortable within my country.
On a good note, today I was pleasantly surprised when a beautiful young lady stopped me in town and said that I was handsome and reminded her of Denzel Washington.
We should ban all visitors who have been to high risk countries within the last 14 days from entering zambia.
IT WAS EASY TO BLOCK HH ALONE NOW YOU HAVE TO FIND A WAY TO STOP THE ALLIANCE FROM CAMPAIGNING. BOWMAN LUSAMBO WAS CAMPAIGNING YESTERDAY YOU DIDNT SAY ANYTHING.
Lies! Who did the genome typing to say this is it.,you people should have sufficient senses to be shameful! How variants have you discovered are in circulation in Zambia? This is just desperate efforts to stop others to mobilise politically!
Terrible, cynical lot!
All passengers flying in from high
Risk with indian variant cases should be put in quarantine upon
Arrival like in uk on their cost,
PFFF CANNOT MANGE THE GOVERNMENT
HOW CAN THEY POSSIBLE MANAGE COVID
You took too long to impose a mandatory quarantine for travelers from India
What about the contacts to this man, have they been quarantined? People on the plane he travelled on were exposed and need to be traced and quarantined. This variant is no joke, we shall perish like flies in Zambia if not careful. In fact, govt should just cancel all flights from India into Zambia. Better safe than sorry.
I said it PF thieves will use this covid-19 to their advantage as August gets closer and closer!!
It’s just sad and baffling assistance flows into Zambia to help combat epidemics and other diseases but the response by government is lackadaisical and assistance resources vanish without achieving 50% of what they were meant for. Of information on Covid 19 that government shares with the citizenry, most of it is “cut and paste” from information filtering through from around the globe and substituting the narrative to the Zambian situation! The Ministry of Health is not well funded to equip itself with institutional needs to elevate services delivery and research! That someone traveled from India of course calls for quarantine going by happenings in that country but, that the “Indian variant” was detected when I doubt availability of capacity and research to identify the many…
The Indian covid 19 variant is very deadly ,there is need to intensify awareness and probably be strict on the point of entries.
The biggest problem we have is we want to take things casually, this is a woke up call even to our economy ,that we should not depend on other countries on a number of things which we can produce locally.
We also need to increase toil fees for foreign trucks or cars passing through Zambia ,because its costly to monitor there movements .
Of late people have relaxed on wearing masks in public.
Don’t even waste time declare a total ban for those who are travelling from India the same way Australia has done it. Why do we wait until things go out of control yet we have all the data. It is well known that Covid-19 originated from Pakistan/India and we want to pretend as though all is well. Lamuka Dr. Malama and team.
I meant Covid-19 in terms of transmission to Zambia but not the world. Dr. Malama and his team should be on top of things instead of just releasing press statements which will not prevent the spread of this deadly pandemic.
We should put safety ahead of politics. Rallies should be banned. People already know who they want to vote for. If people want to change government they don’t need rallies to do that. Most of the time voting is a thing of allegiance. Very few people decide to vote for a certain candidate because of political rallies otherwise PF would have had come into government way before 2011 and UPND will have had been in government too. So for the safety of the citizens government should not allow political rallies because they are characterised with violence and confusion. Most people have got access to radios and TVs and we have a lot of community radios so there should be no cry of ZNBC disadvantaging anyone. Political parties should do flyers to give one on one and that’s more effective than…