(TibetanReview.net, Feb06’21) – India may launch the third phase of vaccination against Covid-19, for citizens who are above the age of 50 years and those who are younger but with serious co-morbidities, around mid-March, health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan has told the Lok Sabha, the Upper Chamber of Indian parliament, on Feb 5. There might be an initial preference for persons over 60 years, the minister has said.
A total of 54,16,849 have already been vaccinated since Jan 16 in the first two phases covering healthcare workers, followed by other frontiline workers.
The development comes as the number of active Covid-19 cases in India fell below 1.5 lakh and daily new deaths again fell below 100 according to official reports this morning.
Meanwhile the latest data from India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare show that there were 11,713 new Covid-19 cases and 95 new deaths in the country in the past 24 hours as of Feb 6 at 8 AM, taking their cumulative totals to 10,814,304 cases and 154,918 deaths respectively.
A total of 10,510,796, or 97.19%, had recovered while the number of active cases was 148,590, or 1.37% of the total. The case fatality rate remained at 1.43%. The percentage figures were mostly improvement over those reported the day before.
The latest daily number of new cases, at 11,713, was less than the daily number of those who had recovered, at 14,488, leading to a decrease in the number of active cases by 2,870.
Eight states that reported the highest numbers of Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours were: Kerala (5,610), Maharashtra (2,628), Tamil Nadu (489), Karnataka (430), Chhattisgarh (336) and Gujarat (267), Punjab (199) and West Bengal (194).
Four states with the highest number of Covid-19 deaths in the last 24 hours were: Maharashtra (40), Kerala (19); Chattisgarh (8) and Tamil Nadu (4).
India is currently the country with the world’s second highest number of Covid-19 cases and the fourth highest number of deaths in cumulative numbers.
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The cumulative number of Covid-19 cases among Tibetans in India, Nepal and Bhutan has remained unchanged for the second day at 1,519. Of them 1,449 had recovered, 29 were active and 41 had died, according to the tally of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) as of Feb 5.
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Across the world the number of Covid-19 cases totaled 105,447,720 and the deaths 2,300,427, according to the tally of Johns Hopkins University as of 2:53 PM on Feb 6, 2021.
