NEW DELHI, Jan 28: India has reached one million vaccinations fastest in the world achieving the landmark in just six days, the union health ministry said on Thursday.
The union health secretary Rajesh Bhushan giving the comparative figure of other countries in reaching the first one million mark in vaccination pointed out that the United States reached the landmark in 10 days, Spain in 12 days, Israel in 14 days, the United Kingdom in 18 days, Italy in 19 days, Germany in 20 days and the United Arab Emirates in 27 days.”
According to the health ministry, India has administered over 25 lakh vaccine doses so far. “The number of active cases are declining, there are 1,75,000 active cases in the country as of now. A steady and declining trend is being exhibited,” Bhushan added.
Two states still have 40,000 or more active cases and contribute 67 per cent of the total caseload – Kerala with 72,000 active cases and Maharashtra with 44,000 active cases. India’s cumulative Covid-19 positivity rate is 5.51% and is declining.
Odisha, Haryana, Rajasthan, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are among better performing states with over 35 per cent vaccination coverage of healthcare workers, the government said. However, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra have less than 21 per cent vaccination coverage.
The union health minister Harsh Vardhan said India had flattened its COVID-19 graph and 146 districts have reported no new case of the viral disease in the last seven days, 18 in 14 days, six in 21 days and 21 districts in the last 28 days. This has been achieved due to pro-active testing with more than 19.5 crore COVID-19 tests conducted in the country so far, Vardhan, who chaired the 23rd meeting of the high-level Group of Ministers (GoM) on COVID-19 through a video-conference, said.
Meanwhile, India’s COVID-19 tally of cases on Thursday crossed 1.07 crore with 11,666 new infections reported in the last 24 hours while the national recovery rate climbed to 96.94 per cent.
The total infections have mounted to 1,07,01,193. The death toll increased to 1,53,847 with 123 daily new fatalities, the union health ministry data showed. The COVID-19 case fatality rate stands at 1.44 per cent and the active cases remained below 2 lakh for the ninth consecutive day.
(Manas Dasgupta)