Turkey administers over 578,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines in single day

By Sena Guler, Ismet Karakas, and Burcu Calik Gocumlu

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey administered a total of 578,762 doses of COVID-19 vaccines over the past day, official figures showed on Friday.

The country has given over 32.8 million doses since it launched a mass vaccination campaign in mid-January, the Health Ministry said.

More than 19.21 million people have received their first doses, while 13.57 million have been fully vaccinated.

The ministry also confirmed 6,261 new coronavirus cases, including 561 symptomatic patients, in the last 24 hours. The number of new cases on Thursday was 6,408.

Turkey's overall case tally is nearly 5.32 million, while the nationwide death toll has reached 48,593 with 69 new fatalities.

As many as 6,217 more patients won the battle against the virus, raising the number of recoveries to nearly 5.2 million

Over 56.57 million coronavirus tests have been done to date.

The latest figures put the number of COVID-19 patients in critical condition at 997.

- Vaccination drive expanded

Turkey has added cargo workers, couriers and employees of intracity and intercity transportation, as well as workers of taxi and minibus services to COVID-19 vaccine priority groups.

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Twitter that the specified workforce can get inoculated from Saturday.

"Doses [of Pfizer-BioNTech] not used within six hours will be wasted. The vaccine is valuable, not easy to provide. Do not miss your appointment," he added.

To contain the spread of the virus, Turkey is currently implementing a curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. from Monday to Saturday, and a full lockdown on Sundays.

Since December 2019, the pandemic has claimed over 3.77 million lives in 192 countries and regions, with more than 174.9 million cases reported worldwide, according to the US-based Johns Hopkins University.