20.2 pc of people who received one dose of COVID vaccine globally reside in India: Govt

At least 20.2 per cent of all the people who have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine globally, reside in India, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Monday.

Addressing a virtual meeting of the high-level Group of Ministers (GoM) on COVID-19, he added that India's recovery rate has risen to 93.94 seven states/union territories have fewer than 1,000 active cases.

He further informed that in the last 24 hours, India reported the least number of daily new cases in the last 61 days with just over 1 Lakh cases (1,00,636). Today is the 25th day in succession where our daily recoveries outnumbered new cases.

Speaking on vaccines and clinical intervention, Vardhan observed, "We have administered 23,27,86,482 vaccine doses to our countrymen in various categories. In the 18-44 age group, the first dose has been given to 2,86,18,514 people. Over 1.4 crore doses are still available with the states."

On the testing front, he noted that over 36.6 crore (36,63,34,111) tests have been conducted so far, including 15 lakh tests on Sunday despite being a holiday.

"The labs for testing purposes have also gone up to 2,624. Daily Positivity Rate has also been declining and is at 6.34 per cent and even though this is less than 10 per cent positivity rate for 14 consecutive days, there still are 15 states where the daily positivity rate is greater than 10 per cent," he said.

He also noted that Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genome Sequencing Consortia (INSACOG) sequencing labs are looking at the mutants which have significant potential of severely affecting the disease transmission.

"As of now, 10 National labs under INSACOG have sequenced around 30 thousand samples. 18 more labs have been added to the consortium recently to boost the capacity of sequencing," he said.

So far, as many as 28,252 cases of Mucormycosis (black fungus) have been reported from 28 states.

"Out of these, 86 per cent (24,370 cases) have a history of Covid-19 infection and 62.3 per cent (17,601) have a history of diabetes. The Maharashtra has reported the maximum number of Mucormycosis cases (6,339) followed by Gujarat (5,486)," he informed.

Attendees of the meeting included Union Ministers Dr S Jaishankar, Hardeep S. Puri, Nityanand Rai, Ashwini Kumar Choubey, among many others.

( With inputs from ANI )