A woman walks past a vaccination centre that was shut due to shortage of doses in India’s Mumbai city on 9 July, 2021
(AFP via Getty Images)
India’s vaccination drive against Covid-19 has significantly slowed down since the federal government implemented a new policy on 21 June which made inoculation free for all.
This comes as India reported 38,949 new coronavirus cases in the 24 hours ending Friday morning, taking the tally above 31 million.
The number of daily vaccinations was high till the end of the first week after the new policy came into effect. The average pace touched a peak of 6.4 million jabs a day for the week ending 26 June.
This dropped to 3.4 million doses being administered daily on average in India in the past seven days, according to Hindustan Times’s Covid-19 dashboard.
India aims to inoculate all adults by the end of this year, and experts have said it needs to administer at least 10 million doses a day.
Meanwhile, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has said that there was “zero” risk of the Olympics participants infecting the Japanese population.
His statement came as daily Covid-19 cases hit a six month high of 1,308 in Tokyo on Thursday.
EU medical body says it hasn’t received Covishield application for authorisation
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has said it still hasn’t received an application from India’s Serum Institute — which manufactures the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot locally called ‘Covishield’ — for authorisation of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Reports last month said that people inoculated with Covishield may face hurdles while travelling to the European Union because it’s not one of the vaccines recognised by the EMA yet.
Serum Institute of India’s chief executive Adar Poonawalla said at the time that he had taken the matter up at the “highest levels”.
Akshita Jain16 July 2021 06:41
After Sydney, Australia puts Melbourne under lockdown
Australian authorities have announced a five-day lockdown for the state of Victoria — which is home to second largest city Melbourne — after a surge in Covid-19 cases.
The state recorded 18 new infections in the past two days.
Melbourne and the rest of Victoria join Sydney in a lockdown as authorities scramble to contain the spread of the virus driven by the Delta variant of Covid-19. This is the fifth lockdown in Melbourne since the pandemic began.
Akshita Jain16 July 2021 06:25
WHO warns of ‘strong likelihood’ of more dangerous variants of Covid-19
The emergency committee of the World Health Organisation has warned that there’s a “strong likelihood” for the emergence of new and possibly more dangerous variants of Covid-19.
WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had earlier said that the world is now in the early stages of a third wave with the Delta variant being one of the main drivers of the current increase in transmission.
He said that Delta — which was first detected in India — is now in more than 111 countries and it is soon expected to become the dominant variant globally.
Akshita Jain16 July 2021 05:45
Good morning, and welcome to The Independent’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic for Friday 16 July, 2021.
Akshita Jain16 July 2021 05:21
