300 000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are expected to arrive in the country this afternoon. The Department’s Technical Advisor, Dr Aquina Thulare, briefing Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Health yesterday, says they are confident that they will be able to vaccinate all the country’s educators, with the batch arriving today, and another bigger J & J batch coming next week. In addition to the 300 000 J & J doses arriving today, the country will also receive 636 000 Pfizer vaccines, also today, with more Pzifer doses to follow.

In the Western Cape, another mass-vaccination site is being planned in Mitchell’s Plain, to further ramp up the province’s vaccination capabilities. The Western Cape’s head of Health, Dr Keith Cloete, says everything is still on track for the opening of the CTICC mass-vaccination site, in the first week of July. Cloete says the CTICC-site will be operational for 12 hours a day, 7 days of a week.

Cloete added the province will ramp up its covid-19 response, to accommodate the increase in covid-19 patients. The response includes making more beds and oxygen available in hospitals and clinics, as and when needed. Cloete says with more than a thousand covid-19 patients admitted to hospitals, the province is officially in its third wave.