Covid vaccinations in India near record

People stand in a queue to get inoculated with a dose of the Covaxin vaccine against Covid-19 at a temporary vaccination centre set up inside a school in Mumbai yesterday.

India administered more than 8.8mn doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the past 24 hours, government data showed yesterday, close to its all-time record and speeding up a campaign to inoculate all eligible adults by December. The surge in inoculations came alongside a sharp decline in daily new infections that fell to 25,166, the lowest since March 16, health ministry said. India has undertaken one of the world’s largest Covidd-19 vaccination drives and has so far administered 554mn doses, giving at least one dose to about 46% of its estimated 944mn adults. Only about 13% of the population have had the required two doses. After hitting a record high of 9.2mn doses on June 21, the pace of daily inoculations had dropped to around 4.2mn on an average in July, according to data compiled from the government’s CoWIN website. In the first two weeks of August, India administered about 5mn doses on an average everyday. Experts have said India needs to administer 10mn doses a day to achieve its aim of inoculating all adults by December. “For each day we fall short of it, the required target goes further up,” Rijo John, health economist and a professor at the Rajagiri College of Social Sciences in the southern city of Kochi. “Realistically, I do not think we will be able to cover all adults fully by this year’s end.” Kerala on Monday logged 12,294 new Covid-19 cases pushing the infection count to 36,81,965, as the number of people succumbing to the disease rose to 18,743 with 142 additional deaths.