UAE: 49,584 Covid vaccine doses administered in 24 hours

The total doses administered now stand at 21.1 million.

The UAE has administered 49,584 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine in the past 24 hours.

The country's Ministry of Health and Prevention (MoHAP) said the total doses administered now stand at 21.1 million.

This takes the rate of doses to 213.84 per 100 people.

Quarantine-free travel from New Zealand to Australia will resume from Monday, Australia’s tourism minister said on Sunday, as the country readies itself for a partial reopening of its international borders for the first time since March 2020.

Vaccinated Australian citizens and permanent residents living in New South Wales, Victoria and the capital Canberra will be free to fly internationally from Monday without the need of an exemption or to quarantine upon return. For now, however, only tourists from neighbouring New Zealand will be allowed into Australia, provided they are vaccinated.

US health officials have offered more evidence that vaccinations offer better protection against Covid-19 than immunity from a prior infection.

Unvaccinated people who had been infected months earlier were five times more likely to get Covid-19 than fully vaccinated people who didn’t have a prior infection, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in a new study.

“These data show, pretty strongly, that the vaccines are more protective against symptomatic Covid,” said Dr Mike Saag, an infectious disease expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was not involved in the study.

• Abu Dhabi