New Delhi: After attending the G-20 summit in Rome and COP26 in Glasgow, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold a review meeting with the districts which have low Covid-19 vaccination coverage at 12 noon on Wednesday, November 3, via video conferencing. The meeting will include districts with less than 50 per cent coverage of the first dose and low coverage of the second dose of the Covid-19 vaccines.
The PM will interact with the district magistrates of over 40 districts in Jharkhand, Manipur, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Meghalaya and other states with districts that have low vaccination coverage. The chief ministers of these states will also be present.
India's Covid-19 vaccination coverage has exceeded 106.14 crores. Of the total of 1,06,14,40,335 vaccine doses administered to the eligible beneficiaries, 68,04,806 doses have been administered in the last 24 hours.
While a daily average of 78.69 lakh doses were given in September, the figures have gone down to about 56.50 lakh doses a day in October.
Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray too has expressed concern over the slow pace of vaccinations. He, however, said the availability of vaccine doses was not an issue but people were hesitant to take the jabs, and they should now come forward.
Highlighting the need to accelerate the pace and coverage of vaccination, Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya had recently said there were more than 10.34 crore people across India who haven’t taken the second dose of the vaccine after the expiry of the prescribed interval.
Of the 112 crore Covid vaccine doses provided by the Centre, the health ministry said over 13 crore balance and unutilised vaccine doses were still available with the states and UTs for inoculation. In the new phase of universalisation of the Covid vaccination drive, the Union government procures and supplies free of cost 75 per cent of vaccines being produced by vaccine manufacturers in India to the states/UTs for inoculation.
The Narendra Modi government is now planning to start a door-to-door vaccination campaign against Covid-19. The month-long campaign is likely to begin on Tuesday. Mr Mandaviya recently said the “Har Ghar Dastak” campaign will be launched in the poorly performing districts to enthuse and motivate people towards full vaccination against the deadly infection.
It is learnt that 48 districts in 13 states with Covid vaccine first dose coverage ranging from 16.1-49.9 per cent will be targeted in the first leg of the “door-to-door” vaccination campaign. Many of these districts are in the Northeast.
Nagaland’s Kiphire district has clocked a first dose coverage of about 16 per cent against the national average of over 77 per cent. The maximum number of such districts are in Jharkhand, where 10 of 24 districts figure in the low-coverage list. The principal factor among the laggard states is their remoteness rather than any vaccine hesitancy.
The list also includes Haryana’s Nuh, which is just about 200 km from the national capital, and has a substantial Muslim population. Tiruvallur in Tamil Nadu, where the first dose coverage stands at about 43 per cent, is also in the list.
On the spread of the Covid-19 infection, as many as 12,830 people tested positive in the last 24 hours, taking the total tally to 3,42,73,300. Active cases have now declined to 1,59,272, the lowest in 247 days.
The death toll has jumped to 4,58,186, with 446 fresh fatalities reported in the last 24 hours. Of these, 358 were reported from Kerala and 26 from Maharashtra. Out of the total deaths reported so far in the country, 1,40,196 are from Maharashtra, 38,071 from Karnataka, 36,097 from Tamil Nadu, 31,514 from Kerala, 25,091 from Delhi, 22,900 from Uttar Pradesh and 19,126 from West Bengal.
The daily rise in new Covid-19 infections has been below 20,000 for 23 straight days and less than 50,000 for 126 consecutive days. The active cases comprise 0.46 per cent of total infections, the lowest since March 2020, while the national Covid-19 recovery rate stands at 98.20 per cent.
A decline of 2,283 cases has been recorded in the active caseload in a span of 24 hours. The number of people who have recuperated from the disease has surged to 3,36,55,842, while the case fatality rate is 1.34 per cent. The daily positivity rate recorded at 1.13 per cent has been less than two per cent for the last 27 days. The weekly positivity rate at 1.18 per cent too has been below two per cent for the last 37 days.
