(TibetanReview.net, Jan25’21) – As the world approaches 100 million coronavirus cases, questions are surfacing about new variants of the virus that could slow or even reverse the progress that has been made toward ending the pandemic, noted the nyt.com Jan 24.
And one of those questions is how effective the current vaccines will be against these altered versions of the virus, which initially appeared in Britain, South Africa, Brazil and the US. Some appear to be more contagious than the original version, and all are little understood, the report noted.
Meanwhile, India said Jan 24 that it had vaccinated over 16 lakh healthcare workers against the pandemic coronavirus since Jan 16, including 31,000 in five states that day.
The vaccination campaign continues as the country reported that its weekly Covid-19 cases had fallen under the one-lakh mark for the first time in seven months.
This week, cases saw an 8.7% drop from the previous seven days. This was the 11th consecutive week of decline in cases, reported the timesofindia.com Jan 25.
Recorded deaths from the virus were reported to have registered a week-on-week fall of 16.4%, with the death toll having now fallen for seven weeks in a row.
***
Meanwhile the latest data from India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare show that there were 13,203 new Covid-19 cases and 131 new deaths in the country in the past 24 hours as of Jan 25 at 8 AM, taking their cumulative totals to 10,667,736 cases and 153,470 deaths. Both the daily numbers were lower than those reported the day before.
In fact, this was the 18th consecutive day India reported less than 20,000 new Covid cases, noted tribuneindia.com Jan 25.
A total of 10,330,084, or 96.83%, had recovered while the number of active cases was 184,182, or 1.73% of the total. The case fatality rate remained at 1.4%. The percentage figures were the same as those reported the day before, except for the death rate which was 1.44%.
The latest daily number of new cases, at 13,203, was slightly more than the daily number of those who had recovered, at 13,298, leading to a marginal increase in the number of active cases by 226.
Kerala, the country’s fourth worst-hit state and having the highest number of active cases continued to report the highest daily new infections at 6,036, followed successively by the country’s worst-hit state with the second highest number of active cases Maharashtra (2,757), second-worst hit state Karnataka (573), fifth worst-hit state Tamil Nadu (569), Gujarat (410), West Bengal (389), Chattisgarh (300), seventh-worst hit state Uttar Pradesh (268), eighth worst-hit state Madhya Pradesh (252), … Himachal Pradesh (21), and so on.
The 131 daily new deaths included 45 from Maharashtra; 20 from Kerala; 8 each from Chattisgarh, Uttar and West Bengal; 9 from Delhi; 7 from Tamil Nadu. The rest of the states have reported from 4 to no death.
India is currently the country with the world’s second highest number of Covid-19 cases and the third highest number of deaths in cumulative numbers.
***
The cumulative total of Covid-19 cases among Tibetans in India, Nepal and Bhutan has remained unchanged for the second day at 1,492. Of them 1,430 had recovered, 25 were active and 37 had died, according to the tally of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) on its Tibet.net website as of Jan 25.
***
Across the world the number of Covid-19 cases totaled 99,225,963 and the deaths 2,130,179, according to the tally of Johns Hopkins University as of 1:52 PM on Jan 25, 2021.
