New Delhi: India's bid to protect its young and teenagers from the threat of highly contagious SarS-CoV-2 virus has picked the pace as the latest data shows that the number of second dose administered to two crucial age groups, 15-18 years and 12-14 years, far exceeds the number of first dose administered to these two groups in the last 24 hours.
According to the latest official data released by the health ministry Sunday morning (April 24), health authorities and vaccination centres administered a total 1,95,557 doses of the Covid vaccine in the 15-18 years age group. For the 12-14 years age group, the total number of vaccines administered was 905,518. In the last 24 hours, more than 11 lakh vaccine doses were administered to children and teenagers in the 12-18 years age group, while more than 3.94 lakh (nearly 36%) of them received the first dose, more than 7 lakh of them (more than 64%) received the second dose.
This data clearly shows two things. First, the vaccination for the teenagers in 15-18 years age group has clearly saturated as only 42,477 teenagers in this age group received the first dose in the last 24 years while the number of people receiving the second dose in the age group was 3.6 times more at 1,53,080 who received the second dose in this age group during this period.
It means only one-out-five teenage recipients in this group received the first dose while four others received the second dose. So far more than 5.81 crore teenagers in this age group have received the first dose and more than 4.13 crore have received the second dose. Second, the data for the 12 to 14-year age group also shows that the number of children who received the second dose in this age group in the last 24 hours far exceeds the number of children who received the first dose.
In the last 24 hours, a total 905,518 children in the 12-14 years age group received the covid vaccines, while 3,51,695 children received the first dose, 5,53,823 children received the second dose. It means 39% of the total 9 lakh children in the 12-14 years group who received a Covid vaccine in the last 24 hours received the first dose while 61% of children in the same age group received the second shot, clearly showing that the number of children receiving the first dose in the age group is also saturating but not as fast as is the case with the teenagers in the 15-18 years age group.
So far more than 2.65 crore children in the 12-14 years age group have received the first dose while more than 29 lakh children (nearly 11%) in this age group have received both doses. In the case of the 15-18 years age group, more than 71% of teenagers have received both doses.
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