TIRANA – Although the number of new cases halved on Friday from 99 to 55 medical authorities consider the COVID-19 situation serious in Albania where 3 more fatalities were registered in the last 24 hours.
“Some 431 tests were performed on persons suspected of being infected with COVID-19 and their result confirmed 55 positive cases during the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of infected people to 3,906 in Albania,” said specialist at the Institute of Public Health (ISHP) Flutura Beqo in the daily medical bulletin on Friday. “This figure is almost half of the number of the previous day (Thursday), which stood at 99,” she said.
But Beqo expressed concern over the situation at the two COVID hospitals, Infectious Diseases Ward and “Shefqet Ndroqi”, which as she said remains troubling because the number of hospitalized persons mounted to 104 and 9 of them are in intensive care and 1 in intubation.
The death toll has risen to 107, while there are currently 1,585 active people with COVID-19, mainly in Tirana, Shkodra, Kruja, Durres, according to the details provided by the ISHP specialist.
The number of recoveries is higher than the number of those positively identified with COVID-19 as 77 citizens have been healed in the last 24 hours, bringing to 2,214 the total tally of healed patients, said Beqo.
Is this the peak of the epidemic in Albania?
This has been a controversial question since long, but specialists of the technical committee declared on Thursday evening during talk shows on local TVs that the peak has not yet been reached, which, according to their estimations, will be hit by the beginning of August.
The well known specialist, Pellumb Pipero, who has become popular for the public opinion since the outbreak of the C19 epidemic, said that what is happening was expected because of the easing of the restrictions. In this respect he was worried over the negligence of citizens and insisted that among the necessary preventive measures the wearing of facemasks is number one. According to him, if all the people wore face masks, the spread of the virus would have dropped to the minimum. Although the wearing of facemask has become mandatory since a few days, there is a reluctance of citizens to carry them.
“We are living in a new normalcy and should get used to it because the virus will be with us for a long time until a vaccine is produced,” said Dr. Pipero. According to him, expectations are that anti-C19 vaccines will be available before the end of the year, and he pointed out that hasty work is being done by some medical companies in different countries like US, UK, China, EU countries etc.
But he announced that China was a step forward as it has started to use a vaccine in the armed forces since the end of last month.
China becomes first country to approve a candidate vaccine for use in its military
In a report under the headline ‘China moves forward with COVID-19 vaccine, approving it for use in military’ the portal arstechnica.com said on June 30, 2020, that China has approved an experimental COVID-19 vaccine for use in its military after early clinical trial data suggested it was safe and spurred immune responses—but before larger trials that will test whether the vaccine can protect against SARS-CoV-2 infections.
“This marks the first time any country has approved a candidate vaccine for military use. China’s Central Military Commission made the approval June 25, which will last for a year,” according to a filing reported by Reuters as quoted by arstechnica.com.
“The vaccine, developed by biotech company CanSino Biologics and the Chinese military, is a type of viral vector-based vaccine. That means researchers started with a viral vector, in this case a common strain of adenovirus (type-5), which typically causes mild upper respiratory infections. The researchers crippled the virus so that it doesn’t replicate in human cells and cause disease. Then, they engineered the virus to carry a signature feature of SARS-CoV-2—the coronavirus’s infamous spike protein, which juts out from the viral particle and allows the virus to get a hold on human cells,” said arstechnica.com. /argmentum.al
