Maharashtra health minister Rajesh Tope on Tuesday said the Covid-19 vaccination rate has dropped amid a short supply of doses, even as the state plans to inoculate more than one million people every day. “We want 70% of our population to be vaccinated at the earliest, so that the severity of the third wave is reduced by achieving herd immunity. We could vaccinate only 380,000 [384,499] people on Tuesday, against our daily average of 700,000 over the past few days. If you ask me about the remaining stock with the state, it has dropped to almost zero,” he said.
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The state recorded 8,085 new infections on the day. The government also announced it would continue genome sequencing of more than 3,500 samples of probable Delta Plus variants, at least for the next three months.
The minister said that of the 4,000 samples collected from across the state through genomic sequencing, 21 reported the Delta Plus variant. “Of the 21 cases, 20 got discharged and one died. The person who died was 80 years old and also had comorbidities. We cannot exactly say he died due to the Delta Plus variant,” said Tope.