One year of India’s fight against Coronavirus: 1.7 Crore cases so far

Mangalore Today News Network / NDTV

New Delhi, Jan 30, 2021:     India recorded 13,083 new coronavirus cases today, one year after the first infection was reported in the country, taking the total number of cases to 1.07 crore. Kerala logged the highest number of cases in the last 24 hours with 6,268 infections, followed by Maharashtra with 2,771 cases. Over 14,000 people recovered in the last 24 hours taking the total recoveries to over 1.4 crore. 137 people died due to the deadly disease in the last 24 hours taking the total fatalities to 1,54,147.

 

Kerala has the highest number of active cases accounting for about 42 per cent of the approximately 1.7 lakh active caseload. It is followed by Maharashtra. Active case count, reflecting those still recovering from COVID-19, is used as a measure to check the spread of a disease.

Kerala, where the country’s first COVID-19 case was detected, had quickly became the posterchild for pandemic management with its low mortality rate. But recently, the state has been logging the highest daily cases and is the third most affected state in the country after Maharashtra and Karnataka.

India’s first coronavirus patient from Kerala had fully recovered after 39 days of isolation. "It was not easy to remain isolated for so long but the counselors regularly called me, paying attention to my mental health," the 20-year-old student at a state-run university in China’s Wuhan, the epicentre of coronavirus outbreak, had told NDTV last year.

The national recovery rate is now at 96.98 per cent, the health ministry said. The COVID-19 case fatality rate stood at 1.44 per cent, it stated. According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), a total of 19,58,37,408 samples have so far been tested for the highly infectious disease across the country, including 7,56,329 on Friday.

Over 33 lakh healthcare workers had been vaccinated till Friday, the 14th day of the inoculation drive in the country, the Union Health Ministry said. The pan-India COVID-19 vaccination drive was initiated on January 16 to cover healthcare and frontline workers in the initial phase.

India is using two vaccines - homegrown Covaxin and AstraZeneca’s Covishield made in Pune. India is also sending the vaccines to its neighbours. In the past one week, India has not recorded a single coronavirus case in a fifth of its districts as its immunisation programme covered 25 lakh people with the two vaccines.

Though the country is battling hesitancy, India was on number 5 in global vaccination ranking, the Health Ministry said quoting data (till January 26) presented on Our World In Data. Currently, India is vaccinating about 4 lakh people per day, but by July the government plans to vaccinate 30 crore people and each person needs two doses that means vaccinating nearly 30 lakh people daily starting now.

India’s Chief Economic Advisor Dr K Subramanian said the country’s COVID-19 response strategy helped the country to prevent 37 lakh cases and 1 lakh deaths, news agency PTI reported. Dr Subramanian also added that India’s COVID-19 response was guided by research, epidemiology and economics.

Delhi which has been logging a record low in Covid cases is moving towards herd immunity from coronavirus, with 50 to 60 per cent of people in one district having developed antibodies, the latest round of sero-survey has found, sources said. Herd immunity is what the authorities are trying to achieve with the vaccination programme.

The Serum Institute of India, the world’s biggest vaccine maker, has applied to local authorities to conduct a small domestic trial of American vaccine developer Novavax’s COVID-19 jab, which was found to be 89.3 per cent effective in a UK trial. It was also found to be highly effective against a variant first identified in the UK. But the positive Phase 3 clinical trial data was partly offset by other results that showed it offered significantly less protection against a highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus first identified in South Africa, which is spreading rapidly around the world.