4 crore Indians yet to take 1st Covid jab, 7 crore didn’t take 2nd: Govt

Despite 200 crore plus Covid vaccine doses being administered, India still has around four crore people who did not take the first dose and another 7-8 crore who did not take the second dose, top government officials said here on Tuesday.

In addition, only 7 crore of the 69 crore eligible population took the precautionary third dose, the officials said, flagging the gaps in the vaccination programme.

“Covid-19 is not over yet. We are currently administering 20.4 lakh doses of the precautionary shot. But the number has to go up substantially to cover the entire eligible population,” said a health ministry official.

The daily uptake of the third dose was quite low till mid July – just about a few lakh shots – when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a special 75 day campaign to get the precautionary shot free of cost at government health care centres.

Read | Booster doses, Covid-appropriate behaviour key to check virus spread, says expert

Officials blamed a sense of complacency among people for low coverage of the third dose (11%), and asserted it would be required to limit the spread of infection particularly among the high risk population.

“There is an element of fatigue and a sense of complacency. We have to reinvigorate the (vaccination) system,” he said.

Officials said six states including Karnataka report more than 1,000 new Covid-19 cases daily. Others are Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and West Bengal. In another seven states, the number of new cases reported daily range between 500 and 1,000.

Punjab has emerged as a state of concern as the number of daily new cases has jumped by 2.5 times within a week. The average number of such cases was 254 in the July 13-19 week, but shot up to 631 in July 20-26.

“There are 181 districts that are reporting a weekly positivity of more than 10% in the week ending July 25. In another 107 districts, the weekly positivity varies between 5-10%,” he said.

For the better part of the last two weeks, the number of daily new cases remains above 20,000 with a marginal drop in the count on the weekend.

“Looking at the global scenario, we need to be on high alert. There is poor surveillance, poor testing and below average vaccination in many states undergoing the present surge”, V K Paul, NITI Ayog member and the Centre’s principal advisor on Covid-19 said in a review meeting last week.