Vietnam’s business hub Ho Chi Minh City wants to have more than 18 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine for its immunization plan next year, in addition to four million jabs for the rest of 2021, local health authorities have said.

The municipal Department of Health on Friday issued a dispatch to the Ministry of Health’s Department of Preventive Medicine to report on the city’s receipt and use of COVID-19 vaccines and its demand for vaccine allocation next year.

The department said it will offer booster shots to fully vaccinated people six months after their second jabs and need over 18 million vaccine doses for this inoculation plan.

Of the total, more than 14.4 million doses for people aged 18 and older, some 1.5 million doses for children aged 12 to 17, and over 2.1 million doses for those from three to 11 years old.

In addition, the city needs more than one million vaccine doses from now until the end of the year to provide the first shots for those who remain unvaccinated and the second dose for those who have got the first jabs.

This vaccine volume includes 696,000 AstraZeneca, 60,000 Pfizer and 264,000 Vero Cell jabs.

The city also needs over 2.9 million vaccine doses for children, including some 1.2 million doses for first shots and the remainder for second jabs.

Thus, the city’s total vaccine demand from now to the year end is nearly four million doses.

By October 31, the Ministry of Health had allocated more than 14.2 million doses of vaccines to the city, the department said.

As of Friday, the city had administered a total of 13.75 million doses to residents, including 7.85 million first shots and 5.9 million second jabs, according to the national COVID-19 vaccination portal.

The corresponding numbers for the whole country are 63.68 million and 32.87 million.

Since the pandemic hit Vietnam since early 2020, the city has documented 442,306 and 17,099 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health’s data.

Nationwide, a total 1,009,879 patients have been recorded, including 856,211 recoveries and 22,930 fatalities.

Despite its daily infection numbers increasing again recently, Ho Chi Minh City’s death toll has remarkably dropped, at 42 on Friday from 200 two months ago.

Similarly, the country’s fatalities plummeted from 261 two months back to 81 on Friday.

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