Canada to receive 6.5 million Covid-19 vaccines by end of March

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During a press briefing on Friday, Trudeau reiterated that he expected every Canadian who wants a vaccine to receive one by September.

Trudeau told reporters that Canada has obtained two million additional doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine through Verity Pharmaceuticals and the Serum Institute of India. The first shipment of 500,000 vaccines should arrive within a few weeks.

The shipment would increase the 20 million doses the country has already obtained from AstraZeneca, Trudeau said.

Canada also received 643,000 doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines this week, Trudeau said.

Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna had significantly slowed deliveries to Canada after a combination of manufacturing delays and requests from Europe, where Canada buys its doses.

Since vaccinations began in late December, more than 1.7 million doses of vaccine have been administered out of more than 2.4 million doses distributed across the country, according to Health Canada.

New variants are spreading

Canada has reported 858,217 cases of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, who briefed reporters on Friday.

There have been 21,865 deaths from Covid-19, she said.

Over the past week, there has been an average of 97,120 Covid-19 tests completed per day with a positivity rate of 3.2% and a daily average of 2,960 new Covid-19 cases and 52 deaths, said Tam.

Over the past week, there were 2,269 Covid-19 patients in hospitals and 564 patients in intensive care, Tam added.

As of Friday, 964 cases of variant B.1.1.7, 44 cases of variant B.1.351 and two cases of variant P.1 had been reported in Canada, Tam said.

Tam warned that as new, more transmissible variants spread, “controlling the epidemic will be much more difficult.”

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