Coronavirus | India has flattened its COVID-19 graph, says Harsh Vardhan

Active caseload down to just 1.73 lakh, according to Health Minister

January 28, 2021 02:15 pm | Updated 11:36 pm IST - NEW DELHI

A row of Covid-19 antigen test kits seen at a testing centre in Karol Bagh, New Delhi. File

A row of Covid-19 antigen test kits seen at a testing centre in Karol Bagh, New Delhi. File

India has flattened its COVID-19 graph and 146 districts recorded no new cases in the last seven days, 18 districts in 14 days, six districts in 21 days and 21 districts in 28 days, said Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Thursday.

The Minister chaired the 23rd meeting of the high-level Group of Ministers (GoM) on COVID-19 via video-conferencing and noted that fewer than 12,000 cases were reported in the last 24 hours and the active caseload had reduced to just 1.73 lakh, as per a release issued by the Ministry.

Dr. Vardhan added that out of the total active cases, 0.46% were on ventilators, 2.20% in ICU and 3.02% on oxygen support. As many as 165 cases of the U.K. variant were reported and the patients were under supervised quarantine and surveillance.

Vaccination exercise

At the meeting, Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan presented the logistics of the vaccination exercise and the gains made so far. He said that 112.4 lakh doses of COVID vaccines were distributed to States/UTs three days ahead of the exercise. “Additional 115.6 lakh doses to States/UTs were completed on January 20 and 69,000 programme managers, 2.5 lakh vaccinators and 4.4 lakh other team members have been trained so far,” he said.

Mr. Bhushan added that 93,76,030 healthcare workers and 53,94,098 frontline workers were registered on the Co-WIN portal.

NITI Aayog member (Health) V.K. Paul informed that India currently stood at sixth in vaccination coverage and would move to third place in the next few days.

“Sixteen AEFI [adverse event following immunisation] hospitalisations out of 23 lakh vaccinations so far translates to just 0.0007%, with no case of severe/serious AEFI or death due to vaccination reported so far,” said Dr. Paul.

The GoM also discussed issues regarding balancing domestic requirements vis-à-vis requests from other countries for Indian vaccines.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.