NEW DELHI: A day after India achieved a remarkable feat by administering over 1 crore Covid-19 vaccine doses, top government officials said this may become a everyday pattern from October when nearly 30 crore vaccine doses are likely to be available.
On Saturday, too, nearly 80 lakh doses were administered, showing that Friday’s numbers were not a flash in the pan. The country delivered 1,03,00,992 vaccine doses on Friday, according to the government’s CoWIn dashboard. By the end of Saturday, the total Covid vaccination coverage was near the 63 crore mark, of which about 15 crore are second doses.
N K Arora, chief of the Covid-19 working group of the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, told this newspaper that in August so far, while nearly 15 crore doses have been supplied to states and private hospitals, 3-4 crore more are in the pipeline. In September, he said, nearly 20-22 crore doses are likely to be available, while the supply figures will reach about 30 crore in October. “From October, I think daily vaccinations could go up to 1.2-1.3 crore,” he said.
Arora added that the vaccination target achieved on Friday successfully demonstrated that India is capable of easily inoculating 1 crore-plus people in a day, provided that requisite supply of vaccines is available. “There is no problem of capacity at all, as we have shown now and the supply issue is being sorted out,” he insisted.
Meanwhile, sources in the Union Ministry of Health and Social Welfare said that Friday’s vaccination numbers were driven largely by Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Haryana and West Bengal. The five states alone acounted for more than half the vaccine doses delivered. Uttar Pradesh, in particular, saw a huge jump, with 28 lakh doses administered. This was four times the average of 6.3 lakh doses administered in a day in the state over the past week.
India intends to vaccinate all above 18 years of age — that’s a target population of nearly 94 crore and nearly 188 crore target doses, considering that all the available vaccines follow a two-dose regimen.
As of now, over 52 per cent of those eligible have received at least one dose, while the percentage of population covered with two doses remains just about 15. The government’s target of vaccinating all adults by the end of the year is largely dependant on supply status.