New Delhi: India on Monday has hit a landmark of record-breaking administration of 78,75,405 Covid vaccine doses on the first day of revised vaccination guidelines issued by the Central government recently. The vaccine doses have been inoculated through 67,839 vaccination sites including 65,777 government and 2,062 private. Significantly, as many as 71,72,735 registrations for the Covid vaccines also took place through the Co-WIN dashboard.
"Co-WIN platform is scalable enough to take any number of vaccination per day. And I expect the numbers to go up substantially during the coming days," Co-WIN chairman Ram Sewak Sharma told ETV Bharat. Notably, a total number of 30,39,996 Covid vaccine doses were administered on Sunday.
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The Central government has recently revised the guidelines for centralised Covid-19 vaccination policy, under which the Centre will procure 75 per cent of vaccines from the vaccine manufacturers produced for distribution, started on Monday. Vaccines doses will be provided by the Centre to states and UTs and all people above 18 years of age will get vaccination free of costs at the government vaccination centre.
In an exclusive interaction with ETV Bharat, Dr Tamorish Kole, senior health expert and President of the Asian Society for Emergency Medicine, said that under the new policy all citizens are eligible for a free vaccination. "Significantly, smaller neighbourhood hospitals will now be eligible to participate in the drive to improve the access to vaccination. But we must concentrate on vaccination of rural population to achieve more success," said Dr Kole. He also stated that more vaccines will be available in India in the coming days, which will definitely improve the vaccine supply.
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Ironically, India stands at number two after the United States as far as registering the highest number of Covid-19 cases. According to the data provided by John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Centre, the total number of Covid-19 cases in the US is 33,542,409 with 601,825 deaths whereas India registered 29,935,221 cases besides 388,135 deaths. Brazil comes third in the list with 17,927,928 number of Covid cases. It has also registered 501,825 deaths due to the pandemic.
According to the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Centre data, there are 1,78,554,302 covid cases registered globally with 3,868,010 deaths due to the deadly infection.
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