A recap of Qatar’s big stories for the week ending Friday 20th August. Brought to you in conjunction with Marhaba.
Starting with last Sunday when it was announced that the Qatar Vaccination Centre for Business and Industry Sector had administered over one million vaccine doses since it opened in June.
On to Monday and the Qatar News Agency said that the meetings of the Qatari-Russian tourism sector in Moscow had been inaugurated.
Tuesday and the announcement that Qatar has recorded a 46.4 billion Qatar riyal trade surplus in the second quarter of 2021. Qatar’s merchandise trade balance, which is the difference between the total exports and imports, jumped by 198.2% during the second quarter of this year compared to the same quarter of last year.
On to Wednesday and QNB announced that they have brought Apple Pay to their customers.
And the Ministry of Education and Higher Education has decided to adopt the blended education system, with rotating attendance in school premises for students of government schools for the new academic year 2021 to 2022, starting from August 29th.
Yesterday saw the United Nations refugee chief hail Qatar’s efforts in Afghanistan.
And the Cabinet approved 100% foreign ownership of major Qatari banks.
And in today’s papers the peninsula’s say that 20% of car charging stations will be powered by clean energy. So far 19 car charging stations have been installed across the country. And another 100 will be added soon.
Now for this weeks COVID update. There have been 1,085 new local cases reported in the last 7 days. And 593 reported arriving into the country. Giving a total of 1,678 new cases. There were 1,237 recoveries and no COVID related deaths meaning that active cases have risen by 441 since last week to 2,817 active cases.
Of note is the fact that even though active cases continue to rise slowly, there have been no COVID related deaths for the past 23 days.
