NEW DELHI, Nov 6: A buoyant India registering more recoveries than the number of new Corona positive cases daily for the last five weeks, has promised to use its vaccine production capacity to help the whole world to fight against the pandemic in keeping with the prime minister Narendra Modi’s promise to this effect made earlier.
Due to continuous recovery exceeding new cases, the number of active cases in the country on Friday has come down to 5.2 lakhs, the union health ministry claimed.
“New Delhi stands ready to help countries enhance their cold chain and storage capacities for delivery of vaccines,” foreign secretary Harsh Shringla said on Friday while briefing the diplomatic corps and representatives of international organisations on India’s Covid-19 response and vaccine development programme, including international cooperation in this field.
“Several countries have been approaching us for receiving vaccine supply. I reiterate our prime minister’s commitment that India’s vaccine production and delivery capacity will be used to help all humanity in fighting this crisis. India will also help interested countries in enhancing their cold chain and storage capacities for the delivery of vaccines,” he said.
Shringla said as a first step the government would take a delegation of ambassadors on a tour of vaccine and diagnostic facilities in Pune to give them a “flavour of India’s robust and resilient progress in vaccine development and in the trial process”.
India is “on track” in the development and trial of vaccines, he said. “We are exploring the possibility of conducting phase-III trials in a few of our partner countries. We are also looking forward to research collaboration in the field of vaccine development,” he said.
“Based on willingness, we may also go for joint production of vaccines in some countries. We have already conducted online training sessions for nearly 90 participants from eight neighbouring countries to develop capacity in clinical trials and clinical practices. Based on demand, we can conduct more such training courses,” he added.
Besides Shringla, the panel that briefed the diplomatic corps included VK Paul, member (Health) of the Niti Aayog and chairman of the national expert group on vaccine administration of Covid-19, principal scientific advisor K Vijay Raghavan, health secretary Rajesh Bhushan, department of biotechnology secretary Renu Swarup, department of science and technology secretary Ashutosh Sharma, CSIR director general Shekhar Mande and Abhishek Singh, CEO of the e-governance division of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
Due to an increase in testing numbers, contact tracing, an effective isolation protocol, increased availability of medical equipment and test kits and a sustained public awareness campaign, India’s recovery rate as of November 3 was 91.96 % and the case fatality rate was 1.49 %
According to the union health ministry, less than 50,000 new cases have been reported in the country in the last 24 hours whereas the daily new recoveries have exceeded 54,000. India is reporting new recoveries more than the daily new cases successively for the last five weeks now. As many as 54,157 COVID patients have recovered and discharged in the last 24 hours whereas the new confirmed cases presently are pegged at 47,638.
There is a continuous decline in average daily new cases for last 5 weeks. From registering more than 73,000 average daily new cases in the first week of October, the average daily new cases have declined to 46,000 cases. The active cases are also on a sustained decline as a result of continuously rising recoveries. The active cases stand at 5,20,773 on Friday. The active cases comprise only 6.19% of the total positive cases of the country.
The declining trend of the active cases is supported by a high number of recovered cases. The total recovered cases stand at 7,765,966. The gap between Recovered cases and Active cases is nearing 72.5 lakh (72,45,193). The national Recovery Rate has further improved to 92.32%
Nearly 80% of the new recovered cases are concentrated in 10 States/UTs with Maharashtra contributing the maximum with more than 11,000 single day recoveries. But the state has also reported a very high number of new cases with more than 10,000 cases followed by Kerala with more than 9,000 cases while 670 fatalities have been recorded in the last 24 hours, the health ministry said.
(Manas Dasgupta)
