With the number of people seeking Covid-19 vaccination significantly down, health authorities in Kathmandu have decided to provide the jabs regularly at the Capital’s four bus stops from Sunday.

Officials hope that those who have not taken the jabs until now for various reasons will benefit from the new arrangement.

“We will provide Covid-19 jabs from our booths set up at New Bus Park, Koteshwar, Kalanki and Balkhu,” said Gyan Bahadur Oli, Covid-19 focal person at the Public Health Division at the Kathmandu Metropolitan City. “Both AstraZeneca and Vero Cell vaccines will be provided from those places.”

Earlier too, authorities had launched vaccination drives at Kathmandu’s major bus stops targeting those leaving the Capital for the Tihar festival.

Most of the local units in the Kathmandu Valley have halted vaccination drives after very few people reached immunisation centers seeking vaccination.

“It seems that Kathmandu residents have already received the coronavirus vaccines,” said Oli, “There is no point continuing the programme, when the vaccine demand seems to have saturated and people are not coming for the jabs.”

The Health Office Kathmandu said that vaccination will be resumed at all local units targeting the migrant population, which might have returned from villages after celebrating the festivals.

The Ministry of Health and Population has also decided to provide Covid-19 jabs regularly from major hospitals in the Valley.

Officials said that the vaccine will be provided from Bir Hospital, Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, Army Hospital, Nepal Police Hospital, and Civil Hospital in Kathmandu. Likewise two hospitals in Lalitpur, including Patan Hospital, will provide Covid-19 vaccines regularly.

The Health Ministry plans to hand over the authority to administer Covid-19 vaccines to provincial government agencies.

Nepal so far has received 23,163,930 doses of Covid-19 vaccines–Vero Cell, AstraZeneca, Janssen and Pfizer-BioNTech.

Of them, the COVAX facility has supplied 4,806,210 doses.

Nepal needs to vaccinate around 78 percent of its 30 million population—or around 25 million people—as per the government’s new plan that includes vaccinating all those aged between 12 and 18 years. Earlier the government had planned to vaccinate only those aged 15 years and above.

Since around 4 to 5 million people are estimated to be living abroad, the government needs to vaccinate around 19-20 million people. For this, the country needs a little over 40 million doses of double-shot vaccines.

Officials at the Ministry of Health and Population said that over 34 million doses of different types of vaccines will arrive in the country within two months.

As of Saturday, 7,713,409 people (25.4 percent of the total population) have been fully vaccinated, according to the Health Ministry.

Meanwhile, the Health Ministry said that oral cholera vaccine will be administered in the cholera-hit local units of Kapilvastu from Sunday.

“All the preparations to administer oral cholera vaccine have been completed,” said Dr Bikash Devkota, Secretary for Provincial Ministry of Health and Population.

“All people above one year old will be administered with a vaccine.”

The World Health Organisation has provided 252,363 doses of oral cholera vaccine for administration in the disease-hit villages of Kapilvastu. The disease, which has so far killed at least six people including three minors and infected 1,372 has spread in five local units of the district—Krishna Nagar Municipality, Yashodhara Rural Municipality, Shivaraj Municipality, Maharajgunj Municipality and Bijayapur Rural Municipality.

Devkota informed that the vaccination programme will be launched in Yashodhara Rural Municipality on Sunday and in the rest of the affected local units on Tuesday.

Two doses of oral vaccine will be administered to the people of the affected areas. The second dose will be administered after 21 days, according to Devkota.