Over 38,000 new Covid cases in India ; vaccine doses cross 500 million mark

India has reported 38,628 new Covid cases in the last 24 hours, a drop of nearly 13 per cent from Friday morning’s 44,643 cases. The positivity rate stands at 2.21 per cent, less than 3 per cent for last 12 days.

India also crossed the 500 million doses mark in total vaccine shots administered so far on Friday, health minister Mansukh Mandaviya said in a tweet. “India soars high on #COVID19 vaccination, historic record of 50 crore doses administered to date,” the minister said.

According to the health ministry, more than 511 million vaccine doses have been provided to the states, of which 23 million are still available to be utilised by states and private hospitals. On Friday, more than 4.3 million doses were administered.

As per the provisional report a total of 500,348,866 doses have been given in India so far.

According to research organisation Our World in Data, around 8 per cent of India’s population is fully vaccinated against Covid while 20 per cent have received the first dose.

Mandaviya also said that while it took 85 days for India to reach the first 100 million doses, the journey from 400 million to 500 million was covered in just 20 days.

Government is expecting 1.35 billion vaccine dose availability by the end of December. The monthly production capacity of Covishield is projected to increase from 110 mn doses to more than 120 mn doses a month, whereas the production capacity of Covaxin is projected to increase from 25 mn doses a month to around 58 mn doses a month.