COLOMBO, Jun 26 (NNN-XINHUA) – Sri Lanka hoped to vaccinate all citizens above 30 years old, against the COVID-19 virus by Sept, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, said.
In a televised address to the nation yesterday, President Rajapaksa said, Sri Lanka received 1,264,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines, 3.1 million doses of Sinopharm vaccines, and 130,000 doses of Sputnik V vaccines.
The president said, in July, more doses of Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines are expected to arrive from China, and arrangements had also been made to obtain two million doses of the Sputnik V vaccines from Russia.
“We could vaccinate 13 million people by the end of Sept this year. Accordingly, we can vaccinate almost everyone over the age of 30 by that time,” the president said.
Commenting on nationwide lockdowns, the president said, no country could continue to function with its airports and ports closed for long. He said, Sri Lankans stranded abroad should be brought back, and imports and exports had to be done at least under some sort of control.
“Due to this unavoidable global connectivity, no country has been able to completely prevent the re-entry of the coronavirus. By shutting down the country, the risk can be controlled only temporarily,” he said.
The president added, in order to successfully control the virus, people must support the strict social distancing restrictions, imposed by the government.
He said, currently Sri Lanka is facing a third wave, due to mass gatherings and travelling on holidays in Apr, and a number of different strains have spread in the country, which created a more dangerous situation than ever before.
“The human resources and other facilities available to the health sector are inadequate to urgently deal with the situation, when the virus spreads rapidly and the number of infected people increases alarmingly. Therefore, the government had to shut down the country again,” the president said.
As a result, the capacity in factories and institutions had to be limited. However, restrictions gravely affected Sri Lanka’s industries. In particular, the apparel industry, which brought in about five billion U.S. dollars to Sri Lanka before the pandemic.
He further said, Sri Lanka’s tourism industry had also suffered a blow, due to the pandemic.– NNN-XINHUA
