India is maintaining the declining trend in Covid cases and there has been an overall decline in weekly positivity cases in the last five months, said the Health Ministry on Thursday.

Rajesh Bhushan, Health Secretary, said that in the last one week Kerala contributed 60 per cent of the total Covid cases, adding that the weekly positivity rate was less than 3 per cent for the 13th consecutive week. On Thursday, India reported 23,529 cases, with 311 deaths in the last 24 hours till 8:00 am. Meanwhile, in view of the rising cases of Dengue across several States, the government is looking at it very closely.

‘An important agenda’

“Dengue vaccine is a very important agenda, and we are looking at it very carefully. There are certain Dengue strains that have been licensed to several companies in India. We are working very closely with them for the trials. Many of these companies have done Phase 1 trial outside the country. We are planning to do more regress trials very soon with these Dengue vaccines,” said Balram Bhargava, the Director General of ICMR. In terms of clearance for Covaxin by the WHO, India has provided all scientific data, and public health considerations and international health requirements have been provided, said Bhargava.

On the Zydus Cadila vaccine, Bhushan said as the vaccine has been given EUA, it won’t come to the market, but would be available in the vaccination programme. “As far as the price of the vaccine at which it will be procured, we are in conversation with the manufacturers. Since this is a three-dose vaccine and also comes with the needleless delivery system, it would have a differential pricing,” added Bhushan.

On the booster dose, Bhargava said it is not pertinent now and the call of the hour is to fully vaccinate the adult population. “The talk of booster dose is not pertinent at the moment. Some studies are being carried out in India, including Bangalore. Some hospitals have looked at the antibodies and they have found that more than 95 per cent of the antibodies persist for more than a year, therefore, so the talk of booster dose is not pertinent.” .

Meanwhile, the Health Ministry has issued a detailed SOP, dated September 21, to the States/UTs to prevent mass gatherings identified as containment zones and in districts reporting more than 5 per cent case positivity. It urged to allow gatherings with advance permissions and limited people in districts with a positivity rate of 5 per cent and below.

In addition, India administered 62.21 lakh vaccine doses on Thursday till 8:00 pm aggregating to 88.9 crore vaccinations done so far, as per the Health Ministry.

Published on September 30, 2021