Over 300 mn vax doses given so far

Daily number of Covid cases increase in Maharashtra and Kerala

India has administered more than 300 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine so far, though the daily vaccination pace in the last three days has slowed down slightly after touching a record on Monday.

The country, meanwhile, registered over 54,000 Covid cases in the last 24 hours, according to data shared by the health ministry on Thursday morning, with an uptick in the number of cases in Maharashtra and Kerala.

Maharashtra, which reported over 6,200 cases on Monday, has seen an increase in the last two days with more than 10,000 cases registered on Wednesday. Kerala has gone up from over 7,400 cases to more than 12,000 for the same period.

Both states are among those that have reported the presence of the Delta Plus variant. Vaccination wise, Maharashtra has administered 29,778,681 doses so far, the highest by any state. In terms of daily doses, too, Maharashtra is in the top five states. On Thursday, the state gave more than 400,000 doses, according to CO-WIN’S provisional data.

The states that led the vaccination drive on Thursday included Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka, in that order.

From 8.8 million doses on Monday, the first day of the new vaccine policy, the coverage came down to almost 6.5 million doses on Wednesday. And according to CO-WIN dashboard data, by around 8:30 pm on Thursday,

around 5.8 million doses had been given.

An earlier statement by the health ministry said, 3,544,209 first vaccine doses and 67,627 second doses were given in the 18-44 years category on Thursday. Cumulatively, 74,345,835 people in this group across 37 states and union territories have received their first dose and 1,570,839 have received their second dose since the start of phase-3 of the vaccination drive, the report showed.

The weekly positivity rate is currently at 3.04 per cent, while the daily positivity rate stands at 2.91 per cent as on Thursday. “It has remained less than 5 per cent for 17 consecutive days now,” the health ministry said.

The government also addressed the allegations of non-transparent allocation of Covid-19 vaccines to states. Health ministry said in a statement that the distribution of Covid-19 vaccine is done on the parameters including population of a state, caseload or disease burden and state’s utilisation efficiency.