We’ve Received Our 1st Batch Of Coronavirus Vaccines – Oyo State

Oyo State Government has come out to confirm delivery of 127, 740 doses of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines from the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency (NPHDA), Abuja.

This was recently contained in a statement by the Chief Press Secretary to Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State, Mr Taiwo Adisa, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to him, 127,740 doses of the vaccines were received by the state government as part of the first phase of vaccine distribution, and the state is already looking forward to the next batch.

He added that the state government has started training health workers who would apply the vaccines, and medical workers will also be trained at the local government levels.

His words, “We will push the vaccines to the 33 local governments where they will be kept under appropriate conditions.”

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Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold (among other possible causes, predominantly rhinoviruses), and others that can be lethal, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Symptoms in other species vary: in chickens, they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

Coronaviruses constitute the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae, in the family Coronaviridae, order Nidovirales, and realm Riboviria. They are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome and a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. The genome size of coronaviruses ranges from approximately 27 to 34 kilobases, the largest among known RNA viruses. The name coronavirus is derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown” or “halo”, which refers to the characteristic appearance reminiscent of a crown or a solar corona around the virions (virus particles) when viewed under two-dimensional transmission electron microscopy, due to the surface covering in club-shaped protein spikes.

Human coronaviruses were first discovered in the late 1960s. The earliest ones discovered were an infectious bronchitis virus in chickens and two in human patients with the common cold (later named human coronavirus 229E and human coronavirus OC43). Other members of this family have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV) in 2019. Most of these have involved serious respiratory tract infections.