BAKU, Azerbaijan, Feb. 28
Trend:
We are the first country in the South Caucasus to start vaccination, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said giving a press conference for local and foreign media representatives, Trend reports.
“We have been keeping the situation under control from the very beginning of the pandemic. The measures that were taken to tighten and ease the quarantine regime were quite effective. We have a fairly low level of those who were infected. We now have a little over 200,000 people who have been infected with the coronavirus. To date, there are just over 2,000 active patients. We have a lot of free beds in hospitals. Because in the first months of the pandemic, we established more than 10 new modular hospitals and also because there has been a positive dynamics between the number of those infected and those recovering in favor of the latter in the last two months. We are also the first country in the South Caucasus to start vaccination. We started vaccination on 18 January, just a month after vaccination began in Europe. We are using the Chinese CoronaVac vaccine,” Azerbaijani president said.
“I must say that we also joined the COVAX system from the very beginning, and we should receive other vaccines such as AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer through it. Also, we signed relevant documents for the supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Azerbaijan with the Russian side in the very first days, because Russian companies are the distributors of this vaccine in post-Soviet republics. This also applies to the Sputnik vaccine. But we have not received these vaccines yet. We have information that the Sputnik vaccine is still being used to address the domestic needs of Russia and that very limited quantities of these vaccines have been supplied to foreign countries,” the head of state said.