As many as 40 mn doses of locally manufactured Sinovac vaccines could be produced by the end of the year, Health Minister Hala Zayed said in a statement yesterday. Zayed has previously said that 3 mn Sinovac doses will be produced in June

We were expecting the first vaccines to be ready by 15 June, but the health minister said yesterday that they will now be ready in “days.” Vacsera, the state-owned agency in charge of manufacturing the vaccines, has said that the first batch of vaccines will be made available in August after they have undergone testing and analysis.

The Health Ministry reported 606 new covid-19 infections yesterday, down from 609 the day before. Egypt has now disclosed a total of 275,010 confirmed cases of covid-19. The ministry also reported 32 new deaths, bringing the country’s total death toll to 15,723.

The highly-transmissible delta variant of covid-19, first found in India, has now been detected over 80 nations, and is continuing its mutation into a more virulent version called the “delta plus” variant, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) has said, CNBC reported. Having already designated the delta variant as a variant of concern in May, WHO is already monitoring some 50 different variants of the virus, while recently adding another “lambda” variant to the list. The newly-detected variant is also highly mutable, which could impact its transmissibility, but more research is still required to understand its outgrowth.