COVID-19 United States Project #45927

End the COVID-19 Pandemic

by UNICEF USA

Project Report | Jun 29, 2021
Update: Supporting Communities Throughout India

By Whitney Simon | Manager, Global Cause Partnerships

Dear Friend,

As you likely know, India was hit by a rapid and deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections. Health and critical care facilities were overwhelmed, leaving people without the medical care that they so urgently need. Cases continue to surge at unprecedented rates. On May 1, India recorded the highest ever daily count of new cases, in any country at any stage of this global pandemic, exceeding 400,000 new cases.

With time, the virus is mutating, and different variants are breaking out, affecting more young people and children in the second wave. Given the exponential rise in the COVID-19 caseload that India grappled with, health facilities were faced with the dire risk of not having an adequate supply of oxygen for their patients. This life-saving gas helps patients breathe when they cannot do so on their own – whether it be children with pneumonia or hypoxemia, newborns and mothers with birth complications, or patients with severe COVID-19 symptoms. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, every year 4.2 million children in low and middle-income countries urgently needed medical oxygen to survive.

Thanks to your continued commitment to ending the pandemic, UNICEF has been working tirelessly throughout to help tackle the devastating impact that the virus itself has had, as well as the impact that measures taken to control the virus have had on India’s children and their families. Most recently, this response includes support to the COVID-19 vaccines rollout. As India and other countries around the world face this rapidly worsening ‘second wave,’ UNICEF continues to support governments, WHO and other partners to tackle this fresh crisis and the further impacts it will have on children and families. Your support ensured that UNICEF India was able to achieve the following outcomes over the past several months:

Increasing access to life-saving oxygen: Oxygen therapy is a critical treatment for patients who are experiencing moderate and severe/critical COVID-19 symptoms. However, just one critically ill COVID-19 patient requires between 25,000-80,000 liters of pressurized oxygen per day for approximately five days. Your support allowed UNICEF to invest in the establishment of 40 new Oxygen Generation plants that can provide enough oxygen for 500 hospital beds as well as 3,000 portable oxygen concentrators to support ill patients.
Boosting testing capacity: Rapid, accurate testing is an essential tool in the fight against COVID-19. However, growing delays in the processing of “gold standard” RT-PCR tests are jeopardizing timely diagnosis and treatment. With your support, UNICEF helped boost test processing capacity in some of the worst affected districts.

As the pandemic continues to effect communities around the world, your generous financial support will enable UNICEF to swiftly procure the supplies needed to diagnose, treat and prevent the spread of COVID-19. Beyond this current crisis, your investment will leave a lasting legacy that will strengthen India’s health system over the coming 10+ years, improving diagnosis and access to life-saving oxygen that will benefit countless numbers of children and their families. Thank you for continuing to stand with UNICEF as we continue the fight to end the pandemic.

In Partnership,

Whitney

Permalink

Mar 8, 2021
Update: Ending the Pandemic

By Whitney Simon | Manager, Global Cause Partnerships

Nearly a year into the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, it continues to perpetuate an unprecedented socioeconomic, humanitarian, and human rights crisis which is taking its toll on the most vulnerable worldwide. The global COVID-19 pandemic is overstretching health systems, exacerbating deep inequities within countries and across regions, and causing children to face widespread disparities. Alongside governments and global partners, UNICEF is committed to ensuring that decades of progress made in child health is not lost due to COVID-19.

With the biggest vaccine procurement, storage, shipping, cold chain and supply network in the world, UNICEF reaches almost half of the world children with over two billion vaccines annually. For this reason, UNICEF has been asked to play a strategic role of leading efforts to procure and supply COVID-19 vaccines for 92 low-income countries and serve as procurement coordinator for more than 90 high-income countries.

On February 24, Ghana became the first low-resource country to receive free COVID-19 vaccines through this program. “This is a momentous occasion, as the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines into Ghana is critical in bringing the pandemic to an end," said UNICEF Representative in Ghana Anne-Claire Dufay. "The only way out of this crisis is to ensure that vaccinations are available for all. We thank all partners that are supporting the COVAX Facility to deliver safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines to all countries quickly and fairly."

Thanks to your commitment to this work, UNICEF will ship more than 14.5 million syringes to more than 30 countries in the coming weeks. Your continued support will help ensure that in 2021, UNICEF and partners will deliver two billion vaccines, 165 million therapeutics and 900 million tests to low and middle-income countries in a safe and equitable way. As the pandemic continues, UNICEF is working with partners to reimagine and develop a world that is a safer and more equitable place for communities and children everywhere. In the words of UNICEF Executive Director, Henrietta Fore, “what the world looks like for children and young people tomorrow is our collective responsibility today.”

In Partnership,

Whitney

Links:

First COVID-19 Vaccines Land in Ghana: A Milestone for COVAX

Permalink

Nov 13, 2020
UNICEF Leading the Procurement of COVID-19 Vaccine

By Whitney Simon | Manager, Global Cause Partnerships

UNICEF/UNI317998/Choufany

Dear Friend,

While UNICEF continues to implement programs to keep children and their families safe and supported throughout the pandemic, we are also leading efforts to procure and supply COVID-19 vaccines for 92 low-and lower middle-income countries.

As the largest vaccine buyer in the world, UNICEF is leveraging its unique experience to work with manufacturers and partners on the procurement of vaccine doses as well as freight, logistics and storage of COVID-19 vaccines. The organization will lean into its decades of work in immunizations to ensure swift, equitable access once vaccines are available: mapping cold chain equipment capacity, developing advance purchase agreements, advising governments on immunization policy, building trust in vaccination and demand for forthcoming COVID-19 vaccines.

As details continue to be developed and refined, UNICEF’s decades of expertise in procuring vaccines and supplies and delivering health programs, as well as insights gained from the COVID-19 response across the world, will provide a clear roadmap of what will be required to support a swift, effective and equitable global response. That said, UNICEF is undertaking the following work to set the world up for success as it moves forward with a potential rollout of a vaccine:

Pre-positioning of over 520 million syringes and 5.2 million safety boxes to fill supply gaps in the most vulnerable communities around the globe;
Purchase nearly 92,000 vaccine fridges, cold boxes and vaccine carriers;
Provide 16 million items of personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep healthcare workers safe;
Support for temperature-controlled freight, ground logistics, and warehousing;
10 million surge stocks of diagnostic test and treatments; and
Provide healthcare worker training in hundreds of languages to 215 million healthcare workers

Thanks to your support, UNICEF will be able to mitigate the negative consequences of COVID-19 and work with partners to reimagine and develop a world that is a safer and more equitable place for communities and children everywhere.

Many Thanks,

Whitney

Links:

UNICEF is Stockpiling to Prepare for COVID-19 Vaccine

Permalink

‹ 1 2 3 ›

About Project Reports

Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.

If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.