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Journalism of Courage
In its briefing on Covid-19 on Wednesday, the Centre flagged Maharashtra and Punjab as “states of grave concern showing recent surge”.
Maharashtra has consistently reported more than 25,000 new cases every day for a week now (see graph; the number updated on any date refers to the previous day’s count). Maharashtra reached a high of 31,855 new cases on Wednesday according to the state government’s update, which will reflect in the Centre’s update on Thursday.
Pune (43,590), Nagpur (33,160) and Mumbai (26,599) had the highest number of active cases until Tuesday. On Wednesday, Pune reported 6,754 more cases, while Mumbai crossed 5,000 in a day for the first time.
In Punjab, where over 320 coronavirus samples have been found to be from the UK lineage — implying that the UK variant could be behind the recent surge — the number of daily new cases has been consistently over 2,000 for more than a week now. The districts with the highest number of active cases until Tuesday (Wednesday’s Health Ministry update) are Jalandhar (2,629), SAS Nagar (2,561) and Ludhiana (2,167).
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Vaccination
Over 50 million vaccine doses have been administered across the country so far. (The first and second doses of either of the vaccines in India’s programme —Covishield or Covaxin — are counted separately in this tally.) The 50,841,286 doses administered represent over 4 times the total number of people (over 11 million) who have tested positive for Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.
