Our Bureau Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin on Monday requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to facilitate supply of 50 lakh Covid vaccine doses to the State every week. This will enable the State to vaccinate the entire eligible population by October 31, apart from administering a second dose, he said in a letter to the Prime Minister.

In addition to regular daily vaccinations, two mega camps were a resounding success with the State vaccinating a record 28.91 lakh persons on September 12 and 16.43 lakh on September 19. The State has crossed 4 crore vaccinations and has administered over one crore doses within the first 19 days of this month. In spite of such an increase in pace of vaccinations, Tamil Nadu is still below the national average, since the State continues to get much lower quantities than its counterparts in terms of per capita vaccine allocation. Hence, unless the allocation is increased substantially, the State will always be below the national average for those indicators, let alone go above it, Stalin wrote in the letter to the Prime Minister.

The Centre had supplied 3.97 crore doses of Covid vaccine and 2.21 crore (0.5 ml) AD syringes to the State till September 19. By deriving more doses out of each 10 ml vial, the State has been able to vaccinate 4.13 crore persons at its Covid vaccination centres.

The State realises that despite the levels of vaccinations achieved in the State, it still has a large eligible population which is yet to get vaccinated, and this continues to make the State vulnerable to Covid. Considering the capacity of the State and the yet to be vaccinated population, the State has no other option but to continue organising such mega camps at regular intervals in addition to daily vaccinations. Only this can help Tamil Nadu overcome the low vaccination numbers achieved in the first four months of the vaccination programme. The State is easily capable of utilising 50 lakh vaccine doses every week - five lakh doses a day for six days and 20 lakh doses for a mega camp on the seventh day of the week, the letter said.

Covid update

Meanwhile, the number of Coronavirus cases in the State on Monday declined slightly to 1,661 from 1,697 on Sunday to take the total number of cases in the State to 26.47 lakh.

After 1,623 persons were discharged, the total number of active cases stood at 16,984. The number of deaths registered was 23. Over 1.53 lakh samples were tested.

New cases in Chennai were 206 while Coimbatore reported 211 cases according to data from the Health Department.

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