India vaccinated over 60,30,000 people against Covid-19 till Monday evening, even as daily new cases and deaths from the infection continued to decline. Covid-19 related deaths have been registering a steady decline with daily fatalities below 150 since the last 10 days. Daily deaths across the country dropped to 84 on Sunday, while 17 states/UTs did not report any death due to the infection that day. On Sunday, 11,831 new cases were recorded across the country.
Officials said effective containment measures, including prompt tracing and tracking, aggressive and widespread testing, along with standardised clinical management protocols had ensured low mortality levels and consistent low daily positive cases.
Of the 60,300,000 people inoculated till Monday evening, over 54,00,000 were health workers and around 630,000 frontline workers. With this, India became the fastest country to inoculate over 600,000 people, achieving the target in 24 days. The US took 26 days to reach this mark and the UK 46 days.
Eleven states have covered more than 65% of their healthcare worker pool with Bihar achieving the highest so far at 77.6%, followed closely by Tripura and Madhya Pradesh at 76.4% and 76%, respectively. Uttar Pradesh, with the second highest number of healthcare workers after Maharashtra, has inoculated 68.2% people in this segment.
Among the poor performers, 11 states have covered less than 40% of their health workers. They include Delhi (38.2%), J&K (37.3%), Punjab, (34.2%) and Tamil Nadu (27.6%). Puducherry has registered the lowest coverage of its health workforce at around 14%. The country’s active caseload stands at 1,48,609 with five states accounting for 81% of the total. Kerala and Maharashtra cumulatively account for 70% of the total active cases.
The Centre has asked every state and Union Territory to schedule all healthcare workers for vaccination at least once before February 20 and immediately thereafter organise mop-up rounds for them. Similarly, all frontline workers must be scheduled for vaccination at least once before March 6. The failure of potential recipients to get vaccinated in the mop-up round would automatically push them to the age-appropriate vaccination category.
Given the target and the fact that only around 13 states have so far given the first dose of the vaccine to 60% of their health workers, most states will be required to pick up pace over the next week.
