Nearly 70k jabs given in Delhi as Covishield second doses push up city’s numbers

The vaccination drive in Delhi picked up pace slightly on Saturday with nearly 70,000 jabs being administered. The increase in the number of shots given, however, was driven by the second dose with more than twice the number of people getting their second shot as did the first, according to data on government’s CoWIN portal.

There were just over 21,000 first doses administered as compared to over 48,400 second doses till 7pm on Saturday, the data shows. The city has been administering more second doses than first for the fourth day on Saturday.

This is because those who received their first Covishield dose became eligible for their second one this week, the government stopped using Covishield doses for the first shot, and only 20% of the Covaxin stock is being used for the first shot.

“This trend is likely to continue for this month and the first week of August after which we expect that more doses would become available to Delhi. As for Covaxin, we will be using a small proportion of the available doses for first dose because the supply is irregular and we do not want to be in a situation where we do not have enough vaccine for second dose,” said a senior official from West district.

Other than Covaxin and Covishield, many private vaccination centres in Delhi have also been administering the Russian vaccine Sputnik V. In less than a month since the introduction of the vaccine in Delhi, just short of 30,000 doses have been administered, according to CoWIN data. The supply of Sputnik V is also likely to pick up with several Indian companies starting to manufacture it.

So far, 7.28 million Delhi residents have been partially immunised, meaning one in three residents have received at least one jab of the vaccine. And, 2.3 million or 11.5% of city residents have been completely vaccinated.

“A significant proportion of the population in Delhi has already been exposed to the infection; and we know that natural infection provides better and longer immunity. So actually we need to vaccinate a small proportion of people here. In contrast, in places like Kerala there is still a significant proportion of susceptible population left because they actually followed Covid appropriate behaviour. The infections there are likely to remain high for some time and people there need to be vaccinated quickly,” Dr Sanjay Rai, head of the department of community medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.