Covid-19 vaccination: Record 12 million vaccine doses administered in a day
A total of 12,869,300 Covid-19 vaccine doses had been administered till 11pm on Tuesday, according to data from the Union health ministry’s Co-WIN dashboard, bettering the previous high of 10,064,376 doses set on Friday. Before that, on August 16, 8.82 million jabs were administered across India
New Delhi: With over 12.8 million shots of the vaccine administered across India on Tuesday, according to data available at 11pm on the Co-WIN dashboard, India’s Covid-19 vaccination drive set yet another single-day record for doses delivered, wrapping up August as, by far, the best month (yet) of India’s mass inoculation programme.
The total number of people across India who have now received at least one shot of the vaccine has surpassed 500 million, data shows.
Tuesday’s record single-day jabs means that in the month of August, the country administered a total of 183.5 million doses, translating to a daily average of 5.9 million doses throughout the month. This average administration is a jump of 1.6 million doses a day over the previous monthly best recorded in July (average of 4.3 million jabs a day). At its lowest since the drive was thrown open to all adults, this pace had dropped to under 2 million doses a day through May, data shows. With more vaccine doses (at least 250 million) available in September, the number could increase even more.
Tuesday marked the third time in the past 15 days that the country has set a new record for single-day dose administration. A total of 12,869,300 doses had been administered till 11pm on Tuesday, according to data from the Union health ministry’s Co-WIN dashboard, bettering the previous high of 10,064,376 doses set on Friday. Before that, on August 16, 8.82 million jabs were administered across the country.
Buoyed by these daily records, the country’s pace of vaccination, which was patchy for months, appears to have finally settled into high gear. In the past week, an average of 8.3 million doses has been administered across the country every day – the highest pace ever recorded in the country, according to HT’s dashboard.
The recent jump in pace comes less than a week after India touched the milestone of covering half the country’s adult population with at least one shot of the vaccine. Till Tuesday night, a total of 651.2 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been administered across the country to 500 million people with 350 million people partially vaccinated and 150 million people having received both doses of the vaccine. When seen alongside the country’s projected adult population of 940 million (according to the Census of India’s National Commission on Population), this means that 53.3% of people above the age of 18 years have received vaccine shots – 37.3% have been partially vaccinated and 16% having received both doses.
A LONG WAY STILL TO GO
While the pace of the drive has seen progress, data shows that there is still a long way to go if India wants to achieve its stated target of vaccinating its entire adult population of 940 million by the end of 2021.
Data shows that the country still needs to increase the pace of vaccinations to completely cover all adults by the end of December, a commitment the government has made in a submission to the Supreme Court. In total, India needed to administer around 1.88 billion doses by the end of the year to meet this target. Since 651 million of these have already been administered, that leaves around 1.23 billion doses still left in the remaining 122 days in the year, or 10.1 million doses every single day for the rest of the year.