India continues to report high spike in the number of daily Covid cases with more than 4 lakh cases reported in the last 24 hours.
Cases in 24 hours: 4,14,188
Total discharges: 3,31,507
Deaths: 3,915
Total cases: 2,14,91,598
Total recoveries: 1,76,12,351
Death toll: 2,34,083
Active cases: 36,45,164
Total vaccination: 16,49,73,058
Amid rising Covid cases, India has reached nearly 15.5 crore inoculations on Saturday, May 1, 2021 as per the latest provisional report by the Health Ministry.
A total of 15,49,89,635 doses have been administered till date out of which 27,44,485 doses were given in the last 24 hours.
The National Recovery rate today stands at 81.84% with 2,99,988 recoveries being reported in the last 24 hours.
On the other hand, 4,01,993 new cases have been registered in the last 24 hours maintaining a daily high spike in the number of Covid cases.
Active caseload: 32,68,710
Number of deaths in the last 24 hours: 3,523
India reports a daily high of nearly 3 lakh covid cases on Wednesday. A total of 2,95,041 cases have been reported in the last 24 hours with 2,023 deaths.
This is the highest ever since the beginning of the pandemic.
Total active caseload: 2,157,538
Total vaccination: 13,01,19,310
The WHO report say’s that there is the possibility that the virus was introduced to humans through the food chain .According to the Chief of WHO , “Further study will be important to identify what role farmed wild animals might have played in introducing the virus to markets in Wuhan and beyond.”
The Data withheld from World Health Organisation (WHO) investigators who travelled to China to research about the origins of the coronavirus epidemic. The WHO Chief has also said that further more data and investigation is required about the origins of COVID-19.
“In my discussions with the team , they expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data,”said Tedros.
United Nations on Thursday commented that Covid-19 may develop into a seasonal disease while cautioning against relaxing pandemic-related measures simply based on meteorological factors.
The UN stated that respiratory viral infections are often seasonal, “in particular the autumn-winter peak for influenza and cold-causing coronaviruses in temperate climates.”
Recent studies signal that transmission of Sars-Cov2 may become seasonal over time. “At this stage, evidence does not support the use of meteorological and air quality factors as a basis for governments to relax their interventions aimed at reducing transmission,” said task team co-chair Ben Zaitchik of the earth and planetary sciences department at The John Hopkins University in the United States.
In view of the increasing cases of daily Covid cases, the Union Health Secretary Shri Rajesh Bhushan and Dr. Vinod K. Paul, Member of NITI Aayog held a meeting today with the MDs (NHM) and Health Secretaries of 8 states to review the ongoing Public health measures of surveillance, containment and management of high active caseload reported in these states/UTs.
According to a report from PIB it was pointed out that 9 districts in Delhi, 15 in Haryana, 10 in Andhra Pradesh, 10 in Odisha, 9 in Himachal Pradesh, 7 in Uttarakhand, 2 in Goa, 1 in Chandigarh continue to be of concern as these districts are seeing a decrease in total tests being conducted, low share of RT-PCR tests, increase in weekly positivity and low number of contact tracing of the COVID positive cases.
States were specifically asked to:
According to a data released by the Health Ministry, 5 states have reported a cumulative of 82% Covid cases in the last 24 hours. On the other hand, nearly 15 Lakh doses have been administered in this time.
A total of 18,327 new cases were registered in the last 24 hours from Maharashtra, Kerala, Punjab, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Maharashtra has reported the highest daily new cases at 10,216. It is followed by Kerala with 2,776 while Punjab reported 808 new cases.
India’s present active caseload now stands at 1.61% of India’s total Positive Cases. 108 deaths were reported in the last 24 hours. Six States account for 85.2%of the new deaths. Maharashtra saw the maximum casualties (53). Kerala follows with 16 daily deaths and Punjab reported11 deaths in the last 24 hours.
As on Day-49 of the vaccination drive (5th March, 2021), total 14,92,201 vaccine doses were given. Out of which, 11,99,848 beneficiaries were vaccinated across 18,333 sessions for 1st dose (HCWs and FLWs) and 2,92,353 HCWs and FLWs received 2nd dose of vaccine.
More than 1.94 cr (1,94,97,704) vaccine doses have been administered through 3,57,478 sessions, as per the provisional report till 7 am today. These include 69,15,661 HCWs (1st dose), 33,56,830 HCWs (2nd dose), 63,55,989 FLWs (1st dose) and 1,44,191 FLWs (2nd Dose), 3,46,758 beneficiaries aged more than 45 years with specific co-morbidities (1st Dose) and 23,78,275 beneficiaries aged more than 60 years.
The chief scientist of World Health Organization and head of world’s biggest vaccine maker says that a global shortage is being faced by the makers of Covid-19 vaccine.
A US law prohibiting the export of certain key commodities, including bags and filters, would create potentially serious bottlenecks, said Adar Poonawalla the chief executive officer of the Serum Institute of India Ltd. — which is licensed to produce hundreds of millions of Covid-19 vaccines from AstraZeneca Plc and Novavax Inc. Soumya Swaminathan from the WHO added that there were shortfalls of vials, glass, plastic and stoppers required by those companies.
“The Novavax vaccine, which we’re a major manufacturer for, needs these items from the U.S.,” Poonawalla said. “If we’re talking about building capacity all over the world, the sharing of these critical raw materials is going to become a critical limiting factor — nobody has been able to address this so far.”
This is one thing that would need some discussion with the Biden administration to explain to them there’s enough to go around,” he added. “We’re talking about having free global access to vaccines but if we can’t get the raw materials out of the U.S. — that’s going to be a serious limiting factor.”
Despite Poonawalla’s warnings, he said that Serum had in the past two months distributed 90 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine to 51 countries after it was granted emergency authorization by Indian regulators in early January — a record pace for the company.
A meeting will be held on Monday and Tuesday between WHO’s vaccine partners, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations and the Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers Network, to discuss these issues, said Swaminathan.
According to the engineers of Rice University, Covid-19 can now be detected in 55 minutes or less with the help of programmed magnetic nanobeads and a diagnostic tool that plugs into an off-the-shelf cell phone and the results will be delivered into the phone.
The Rice lab of mechanical engineer Peter Lillehoj has developed a stamp-sized microfluidic chip that measures the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid (N) protein in blood serum from a standard finger prick. The nanobeads bind to SARS-CoV-2 N protein, a biomarker for COVID-19, in the chip and transport it to an electrochemical sensor that detects minute amounts of the biomarker.
Lillehoj said, “What’s great about this device is that it doesn’t require a laboratory. You can perform the entire test and generate the result at the collection site, health clinic or even a pharmacy. The entire system is easily transportable and easy to use.”
The new tool relies on a slightly more complex detection scheme but delivers accurate, quantitative results in a short amount of time. To test the device, the lab relied on donated serum samples from people who were healthy and others who were COVID-19-positive.
The new tool relies on a slightly more complex detection scheme but delivers accurate, quantitative results in a short amount of time. To test the device, the lab relied on donated serum samples from people who were healthy and others who were COVID-19-positive.
A capillary tube is used to deliver the sample to the chip, which is then placed on a magnet that pulls the beads toward an electrochemical sensor coated with capture antibodies. The beads bind to the capture antibodies and generate a current proportional to the concentration of biomarker in the sample.
The potentiostat reads that current and sends a signal to its phone app. If there are no COVID-19 biomarkers, the beads do not bind to the sensor and get washed away inside the chip.
Lillehoj said it would not be difficult for industry to manufacture the microfluidic chips or to adapt them to new COVID-19 strains if and when that becomes necessary.
The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Rice University COVID-19 Research Fund supported the research.