Algeria will locally produce the anti-coronavirus vaccine from the Chinese company Sinovac, the Ministry of Pharmaceutical Industry said on Saturday, while the most populous country in the Maghreb is facing, like its neighbors, a resumption of the pandemic.

According to a statement from the ministry, Chinese experts arrived Friday to inspect the equipment and materials for the production of the Sinovac vaccine at a plant of the state-owned pharmaceutical group Saidal, in Constantine (east).

The delegation will carry out “technical expertise at the level of the production unit which comes under the Saidal Group, from the end of the period of sanitary confinement”, specifies the ministry.

This inspection is a “very important step in the planning of the production of the Chinese vaccine in Algeria”, he added without specifying a date for the start of this production.

This is the second anti-Covid vaccine to be produced in the country.

A few months ago, Algiers announced that the Russian vaccine Sputnik V would be produced in the territory from September.

Since the start of the epidemic in the country, 160,868 contaminations and more than 4,000 deaths have been – officially – recorded. According to the Ministry of Health, the daily record of infections was broken on Friday, with 1,350 cases.

Faced with successive records of daily contaminations since mid-July, Algeria is seeking, while preparing for local production, to obtain new doses of vaccines abroad.

In Algeria, the Pasteur Institute announced on Saturday that it had received 2.4 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine, bringing the number of doses – Sputnik, AstraZeneca, Sinovac, and Sinopharm – received so far to nearly 6 million.

Algiers has placed an order for 30 million doses with several suppliers, according to a statement by the Minister of Health, Abderrahmane Benbouzid, in early June.

Almost six months after the start of the vaccination campaign, barely 10% of the population of 44 million people has already been immunized.

Epidemiologists estimate that at least 20 million Algerians should be vaccinated to achieve collective immunity.

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune is due to chair Sunday a council of ministers devoted in particular to a new anti-Covid plan while the arrival of the Delta variant has saturated hospital services, causing concern among medical staff.

President Tebboune is expected to announce new measures to combat the outbreak of the Covid epidemic.

The Minister of Health announced this week that “a large hotel” would be requisitioned in each of the 58 wilayas (prefecture) of the affected country for the care of patients suffering from the oxygen shortage in certain hospitals